Before moving on. I think I really need to learn Objective C

So far, I've encountered enough code in Objective C in the Apple iPhone documentation to say that I'm lost Being new to the iPhone, with no prior experience in Cocoa nor Objective C, I found myself getting very little out of the articles I've read so far from Apple's dev center. I thought since I already knew how to program in Java, C, C++ and PHP that I would have enough of a programming background to learn Objective C as I go along but I was wrong. I found Objective C to be a language unlike any other I've ever seen before.

Today, I made the decision to spend some more time to focus on learning Objective C. Hopefully after a weeks time I'll have a stronger grasp of the language and then get back on track to create this iPhone application.

As a first step towards becoming more proficient in Objective C, I went to the bookstore today and picked up a book called "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". Chapter 3 is about Objective C and I found it to be a very well written and easy to digest introduction to the Objective C programming language. The introduction provided me with answers to a lot of the questions I had about the code snip-its in previous articles, such as why we use brackets so much [ ], why functions begin with -, why we don't explicitly declare private, protected and public classes and why Objective C makes such liberal use of the '@' character, to name a few.

Now, not only do I better understand what is going on, but I am beginning to see a benefit to doing things in Objective C. Check out Chatper 3 for yourself and you'll be surprised at how fast you will learn. The book is written by Aaron Hillegass and I highly recommend it:

I'll be spending the next week reading this book and I'll be going through this Objective C tutorial published by Apple.

Apple Objective-C Tutorial PDF