I have been programming on and off for 28 years, and love learning new languages and development environments - I was really excited to see the potential of the iPod Touch/iPhone and wanted to start coding as soon as possible.

Unfortunately I have never been a fan of C, preferring instead more strongly-typed languages with way more syntactic sugar. As a result, reading code samples from Apple or other sites didn't really help as I barely knew when to use (), [], ., etcetera, and the * was a complete mystery to me. My knowledge of OOP is mainly theoretical as well, but I know enough to see where Objective-C is going with the objects.

Working through this book (I am now on Chapter 5) has introduced iPhone/Cocoa concepts at the same time as dipping me gently into Objective-C programming, and I have been able to develop an understanding of the somewhat sparse Objective-C syntax as I have gone along. I have yet to find a simple, small Objective-C primer to go alongside this book, but rely mainly on the Internet for info.

I would recommend this book without hesitation to anyone who is already a C programmer, or to someone who is a competent programmer in other languages who wants to convert.

A particular bonus is that you can buy the e-Book for $9.99 from the APress website, and I use this alongside XCode when I am coding.

All in all, I am very pleased with the purchase.