5 Steps to take to becoming an awesome iOS developer
1. Learn the basic There are no building can be built up high without a solid foundation. same things in learning any computer programming languages including Objective C and Cocoa Touch library. Don't start coding without understanding the fundamental of Objective C and the design pattens for iOS.
The ONLY resource you should rely on is the document published by Apple. There is no other place you should visit if you want to becoming an awesome iOS developer.
2. Learn from the best Both harvard and stanford offering free online training courses on youtube and iTunesU.
3. Pick the right books By all means, The only book you should learn from is apple document. They never teach you the wrong stuffs or bad programming practices. This should be the only book you want to trust and depend on.
4. Write your own code, never copy other's If you let 10 programmers write a same piece of tiny software, believe me, all of them would be different after all. Follow the general programming guidelines along with design pattens and stick to it. Try figure it out everything yourself. Learn some quick and dirty debugging techniques. Avoid using stackoverflow or anything similar. You don't want the messy code appeared on yours.
5. Be greedy Always ask yourself a question, can I do better than this? Does your program run fast enough? do all spaces or memories useage are necessary? use proper tools to diagnostic in which piece of your code use lots of memories or run longer.
Learn modular programming, do you understand the code your wrote in year back? Does it concise enough and easy to be understood by other programmers? if not, how would you improve it?