Best Book for Objective-C ???

The only one I know is "Programming in Objective-C" by "Stephen G. Kochan"

"Programming in Objective-C" is an incredible Objective-C programming book. I learned Objective-C as my first programming language from this text. The author has actually published a second version of the guide, called "Programming in Objective-C 2.0". However, you mentioned iPhone programming, and although I haven't read "Programming in Objective-C 2.0", I am fairly sure it does not have any iPhone programming concepts.

I would get "Programming in Objective-C 2.0" and then also get "The iPhone Developer's Cookbook" Erica Sadun, although I haven't read that either, so I can't tell you how good it is.

The new edition of Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C 2.0", includes a whole section on iPhone programming. Although the hard copy has not yet been published, the book is available as a pdf download from Safari Rough Cuts http://safari.informit.com/9780321605559 ).

I absolutely do NOT recommend Erica Sadun's book for your purposes. It is a collection of code snippets and it assumes a knowledge of both Objective-C and Cocoa programming. It is not suitable for beginners (and I speak as a beginner myself).

Hope this helps!

Erica's Cookbook is a very good read. It's not so much a step-by-step teaching book. It is - as the title implies - a cookbook giving you recipes for the most common problems in iPhone programming. Erica is a very pragmatic programmer so I found useful tips and tricks and things I did not know all along the way while reading her book.

If you're looking for a real in-depth teaching book I've found no good one, yet.

I recommend reading Aaron Hillegass "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X", Erica's Cookbook and the PDFs made available by Apple. That's all you really need. The rest will come on a learning by doing basis.

(The before is true if you're not planning extensive Open GL programming.)

Yes, thank you, I completely forgot about that. "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" is the book I used for learning the basics of the AppKit framework, which has many similarities to the UIKit framework, which is used for iPhone. However, "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" teaches Cocoa frameworks very well, however, it doesn't teach the actual Objective-C language very well, so you might need another book to do that, such as Stephen Kochan's book mentioned above.

Below is my blog link for reviews of the 4 best books for iphone developers, including just out 'Learn Objective-C on the Mac', which a far better way to learn Objective-C than Stephen Kochan's book. (I am not affiliated with either author or publisher, and yes I have both books).

http://www.markj.net/iphone-development-programming-books/

I absolutely recommend Kochan's Book on Objective C.

I used his first version, and am awaiting the Obj-C 2.0 version...

As far as coca and iPhone:
As a beginner, I highly recommend "Beginning iPhone Development - Exploring the iPhone SDK" available in Hard cover AND as pdf. (I f you buy the hard copy, you get, on the last page, the possibility of buying the pdf version for 10 $, which is very handy...)

Erica Sadun's Book, with all due respect, is really not up-to-date ! She is very clear about this: Her book was written during the pre-July08 "official" SDK release date, and I find many of her recipies are all code-oriented. She only brushes up on IB. Also, many of the methods she invokes -And she is also very clear about that- are not "official" and may lead to your code breaking with new OS releases !

Good luck !