How to start programming

Hey guys, I'm kind of new here and must say it's a great site for iPod app news, really helped me chosing games and stuff. Just a bit of background about me, I'm 18 and live in England, on my last year of A-levels and next year going to go to university to study game design. I got an iPod Touch 32GB for christmas and I love it to bits, and I saw there were quite a lot of developers on this forum and thought it would be cool if I could be one of them .

I don't have any prior experience when it comes to coding or game design, so this would be totally new and I'd have to start from the very basics. I know that the language used is Objective-C, and luckily my mum has a spare Mac which I can install the iPhone SDK on. Now, where would you recommend me starting? Obviously books would be a good start, which ones would you recommend? What about online tutorials, it would be cool if I could just start with the very basic "Hello World" style apps and progress up, how would I get any apps I make onto my iPod, etc?

I remember creating a simple shooter game in a free game maker program (I think it was called Game Maker ), and it would be great if I could eventually make a very simple vertical shooter like that, how long would it take to get to that level?

Thanks for any help!

EDIT: Ah sorry guys, I just found this thread which is pretty much the same as mine, I guess you get a lot of threads like this.

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Last edited by Ph4ntom4; 01-10-2009 at 10:06 AM.

Hello Ph4ntom4,

And welcome to the forum's. I think the best place to start is with the apple developer site. Watch all the video's download all the source code and read everything on that site. It will help you tremendously. Next download and read "Become an Xcoder" it is a free PDF and it will also get you started with OBJ-C.

Good Luck!

-Altrez

Oh my gosh this article is amazing thank you soooooo much Altrez

Is it possible to write apps for an iPhone on a PC?

Nope; you need XCode.

--Eric

Unity is apparently being made usable on a PC within the next few months.

Well, that's only the regular version of Unity; the iPhone version is currently a separate product that's Mac-only. There's some talk of eventually integrating the iPhone publishing with the regular version, but still, Unity creates an XCode project which is what builds the actual game for the iPhone. So there's no getting around the fact that you need XCode.

--Eric