iOS Recommendation to get started in programming?

You probably don't need to care about the inner details of the OS itself.

You *must* understand Objective-C 2.0 well, including the memory management guidelines (the GC is not available in iPhoneOS). This should be easy if you already know C++, even more if you are also familiar with a more smalltalk-inspired language (I think Ruby is the closest to Obj-C, but Java also makes sense and is much more popular).

You want to be as familiar as possible with Cocoa for OS X (i.e. the framework to create applications), because CocoaTouch for the iPhone is very similar to Cocoa for OS X. You will find a lot of ressources about Cocoa. I think trying to learn Cocoa before CocoaTouch might actually be a good idea. That is sort of what I did, and I think that Cocoa is much easier to understand, especially the way IB works (quite straightforward to create an interface for OSX, not so much for iPhoneOS).

Like I always say, the AOL guy had no knowledge of Apple programming.

Really, programming languages are the same in concept (at the very least, the basics are). As long as you understand solutions to problems (like if someone gave you a relatively simple program, you'd at the very least know how to go about putting it together.

If you have this understanding, then the best place you can go to is the documentation in XCode on the iPhone OS Reference Library. You can learn almost anything there (except SQLite...for some reason the documentation is very very limited).