iPhone plunge

So, I've been convinced that I need to start developing iphone apps. I mean, iFart sold $70,000+ worth of copies in its first 2 weeks. I'm sure I can come up with some sort of iBodilyFunction app that could bring in some sort of side income, right?

There is a lot of overhead to this. I had to buy a mac and learn new tools in xCode. I have to learn a new language in objective C that is very different from my comfy world of Java. I have to learn a large new API in cocoa. A friend at work who has been doing this for a year or so said plan to make a solid 6 month investment in learning before being able to kick things out.

But, the wild-west entrepreneurial frontier of the app store is hugely appealing. Where else can a guy make hundreds of thousands of dollars peddling their gaseous emulsions? If this were a web app, it would not have made a dime without a marketing campaign that was much more costly and time consuming than the actual app.

So I'm diving in head long, and hope that I don't drown. My first goal is to learn enough objective C to be productive, so I am working through "Programming in Objective-C" by Stephen G. Kochan. So far, it seems like a good book. It would be perfect for someone with very little programming knowledge at all. That is the assumption it makes. As someone who already knows OOP principals thoroughly from java and its C origins, I find myself having to skip a lot of sections that are of little benefit to me. But, I would rather have to do that then have a book that assumes more C knowledge than I have and be left wondering WTF is this code doing?