I think it’s safe to say that Apple’s iPhone has taken the smartphone market by storm. In a recent report issued by iSupply, analysts predict (at worst) a 16% growth in the smartphone market segment for 2009. When you consider that 2008 moved over 173 million smartphones, you can see why many companies want a piece of that pie. With Apple claiming 8% market share in the smartphone market, it’s still trailing behind Nokia and RIM. Last year alone, however, iPhone sales were up 245%! Not bad for being a relative newcomer.

That’s a lot of numbers up there, but it all boils down to one thing: the iPhone is juicy with opportunity. Which means that many folks out there want to play in the sandbox. Including yours truly. But where do you start? Particularly if you have no previous knowledge of the C language? Or Object Oriented Programming for that matter?!

Now, I don’t claim to know how to develop for the iPhone…yet. But these are things and resources I have found so far:

No Espeako iPhone:
The first thing you need to do is figure out exactly what language you’re dealing with. In the iPhone’s case, it’s Objective-C, a strict subset of the C language, coupled with Apple’s CocoaTouch framework. Huh? (Yes, I know how you feel). Bottom line is, we’re not dealing with a scripting language (Actionscript, Javascript, PHP, ASP, etc). However, there is knowledge from these languages we can certainly use.

Read Up:

By far the best book I have found on the subject so far is Beginning iPhone Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. The book is written for people who have little to no understanding of Objective-C (me), though there are spots where it would help if I understood the syntax a little better. The best thing about the book, however, is the way the authors approach the subject. They do a great job of building upon the knowledge that you should already have (more on that below), and upon the knowledge that you’re acquiring chapter by chapter.

Another book that may help in your endeavor is Learning Objective-C on the Mac (also by Apress). I would also suggest following along on your computer when you’re going through these books. It is one thing to read how to do something, and another thing to actually do it. For this to stick at all, you’ll need to do both.

Know the Basics:
If you have been fiddling around with some of the scripting languages mentioned above, you have a good start. Here are some things you should already be comfortable with if you plan on developing for the iPhone:

• variables
• arrays
• comments
• print statment
• conditional statements
• loops

If you have been working on AS3 lately, a lot of the things you learned about classes and objects can be used as well. You should also have at least a basic understanding of the MVC (Model-View-Control) programming pattern.

Learn About C:
Objective-C is a strict subset of C, so having a rudimentary understanding of C helps - a lot. Having never studied C, this presents a big challenge, but there are any number of tutorials and places you can start with. My favorite one is the Cocoa Dev Central website, and more specifically, this post.

I’ll stop here for now, as this should already give you some work to do (and because I’ve got some more development to do myself). I will be back with some more ammo later on - especially when I can wrap my head around these principles more completely. In the meantime, geek out!