Object C in the workplace

Objective-C is basically unused outside of the Apple world. I'd recommend being somewhat familiar with C as well as Objective-C for iPhone/Mac programming. C is useful outside of the Apple world.

 

I would personally suggest learning C first then Objective-C (note it's not called object C). Others (including Stephen Kochan do not). Objective-C is a strict superset of C so it is, in theory, easier to learn C.

I found it easy to teach myself. But I do have a degree in Computer Science from a University that expected students to teach themselves programming languages instead of being spoon-fed chunks of code, already knew C and am a professional programmer.

If you search on here you will find many threads asking about learning the language with a wide variety of responses with respect to approaches to learning, suggested pre-requisites and the difficulty involved.

 

Having strong C development skills, plus enough Objective C to do at least one iPhone/iPad app, would be a pretty good bullet point in the skills section of your resume.

 

Not to contradict the other posters here, learning C can certainly be useful for an Objective-C programmer, however there are a number of reasons why you might want to just dive right into Objective-C and Cocoa and ignore C to start with.

In learning C you will learn the C way of doing things. Things that you wont use for the most part in writing iPhone apps. I'm thinking about things like string manipulation (you'll be using the NSString class and its relatives), arrays (NSArray, NSMutableArray) and so on. It's not that the C you will learn is wrong, but it's certainly not required to get you coding your first iPhone app.

And speaking of your first iPhone app, it's important to make progress fairly quickly. At least from my own experience of learning new languages/frameworks, if I don't make visible progress early on I loose momentum and sometimes interest. That probably speaks more about my character than anything else! However, I'm a Ruby on Rails developer by day and when learning that skill (while I was paid to code in PHP), I dived straight into Rails picking up Ruby as I went. That head-first approach worked well for me.

As for a book to get you started The Big Nerd ranch have a good reputation and their Programming Mac OS X book is a widely respected getting started text. They now have a version of it aimed at iPhone devs, http://www.bignerdranch.com/book/iphone_programming_the_big_nerd_ranch_guide

And for a text covering the base language I'd recommend http://www.amazon.co.uk/Programming...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280853086&sr=8-1

Hope that helps,
Jim