Bit of an intro in case anyone's watching
Okay, well I'm currently a SQL Developer/DBA for a company called ESI (www.esi.info) based in Stirling, Scotland. I'm also a VB.Net & Asp.Net developer. I've been a developer for about 11 years which makes me feel quite old! Bought my first iPhone about 2 1/2 years ago so it was a 3G S. Naturally I wanted to start developing for the iPhone almost instantly but found Objective-C very difficult to get into, mostly couldn't get used to the bracketing and the memory management. It probably would've helped if I'd come from a C background of some flavour but I didn't. I toyed with a couple of frameworks especially the excellent DragonFireSDK (www.dragonfiresdk.com) and managed to get the bare bones of my first game together quite quickly. This was using C++ which I hadn't used before so there was a learning curve which I found quite steep. Whilst learning C++ I had a constant niggle that I should be spending this time biting the bullet with Objective-C but ended up doing neither!! About 6 months ago I came across some free iTunesU content on iPhone development. It was the videos from the CS193P course run by Paul Hegarty at Stanford University. This got me hooked! I 110% recommend getting hold of this content if you're starting out with iOS development. The content has since been updated for iOS 5 so I've downloaded those too and am steadily getting through them. As a direct result of the CS193P course material I've managed to complete my first app entirely in Objective-C. Its a crossword app for the iPad. My goal was to get through the process of learning the fundamentals of Objective-C and as it worked out I've actually ended up with some fairly useful bits of code which I can reuse. It's not entirely complete and only contains 1 actual crossword but I'll get it finished soon and submit it to the app store. I'll post details of my progress.