Go here: http://johnehartzog.com/forums/showthread.php?t=123

To learn objective-C, I literally just typed “beginning objective c” into google and went from there. I did read the one intro book by Apress but it wasn’t that helpful. I actually didn’t learn Cocoa at all, as I pretty much just used cocos2d for most of my objects.

As far as the graphics, I hired a friend who had a good drawing pad and has a talent for artwork. He worked very hard on all the backgrounds and animations.

I created the particle effects basically by guess and check…I modified the example particle effects that come with cocos2d until I found effects that I was happy with.

It took me basically one month to start completely from scratch until the game was ready for its first release. However, I’ve been working on it constantly for about 3 months now, so what you currently see on iTunes is the result of a lot of time and work.

If you want to make a game for the iPhone, download cocos2d-iphone and look at all the example files. It is free to download and free to use, even if you sell your application later on. It is difficult to pick up at first, but as you start making your own game it will all make sense eventually.

As far as a path to follow, I would say to not restrict yourself to any one language. You should understand very well some of the ‘pure’ OO languages like Java, but also work with something closer to the machine like C. Spend some time and create a simple project in assembly language, like a simple sort algorithm, so you can understand better what the compiler is doing behind the scenes and you can understand ways to write your code to be more efficient.

Build a website from scratch (I know I used wordpress here, but I’ve build other websites using nothing but notepad). It just helps to understand as much as you can, so find a project that you think would be fun to work on, and use that project as a means to learn a new computer system that you didn’t understand before.