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When I started to pick up Objective-C, one of the first things that stood out to me (other than the unfamiliar syntax) was how very different the help documentation was compared to what I was used to. Coming from a background as a Flash and Flex developer, I think I’ve been spoiled.

Adobe has done an excellent job of providing examples right in their help documents that tell you very clearly how or when to use a function of a given class. This isn’t necessarily the case with the help docs included with the iPhone SDK. There are examples, but they are not included in the help docs -  a sample project must be downloaded from which you must  search for the relevant line. It loses its context now – and typically  doesn’t have any explanation of the code, outside of the obvious, and there’s a chance that the example is obscure and doesn’t help explain anything.

That’s not to say that the Apple’s help docs aren’t useful – far from it. Now that I feel comfortable and familiar with the language, I find the documentation very useful. For someone starting off, however this might not necessarily be the case.

To get started I found these books very useful:

• Learning Cocoa with Objective-C
• The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook-Building Applications with the iPhone SDK
• iPhone Open Application Development

Once the NDA was lifted from the SDK several forums opened up.

I found these ones useful as well as some other sites with tips and information on Objective-C:

• MacRumors Forums
• iPhone Dev Froums
• Cocoa Dev Central
• CocoaDev

In addition to these resources, Apple is working hard to build up a strong iPhone developer community. You can always search through Apple’s mailing lists, or when Apple kicked off their iPhone Tech Talk World Tour they opened up their beta Developer Forums -  available to you as soon as you register for the SDK. The Developer Forums are increasingly becoming the best place for me to search for answers I can’t find in the help docs.