Way back when, I signed up for the iPhone developer program, downloaded the SDK, read a few articles, never bought an iPhone or iPod Touch, and never actually built anything.

Now with the iPad, I think I'll buy one, and wanted to take a look at the SDK.  Well that's a no go.

I still need to write a “What is a Product Champion?” post, but Joel Spolsky has done a great job writing a post on Program Managers.  At SLB, we don’t have a position with the title of Program Manager, but that title at most companies relates to what we call Product Analysts at SLB (Product Analysts report to Product Champions.)

While reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the fantastic scene on Office Space where Tom is being interviewed by the consultants.

(sorry this video quality is so bad.)

I'm not really a programmer (developer) however I have programmed professionally off an on for over fifteen years.  I started with LOGO and BASIC as a kid.  During college I had proper courses in FORTRAN.  Since then I've programmed primarily in VB and C#.

There are a few little utilities I'd like to whip up for the Mac, so I installed XCode.  Wow, this world is really different.  At quick glance things looked similar:

• there are GUI widgets that you drag and drop onto your forms
• project templates start you off with the right kinds of files
• heck it even creates your menu for you, and populates it with most of the basic stuff you need

But the similarities end there.  I've been trying to read several cocoa sites, however I think its time for a book.  If you can recommend a Cocoa/XCode/Objective-C book geared towards beginners, I'd love to hear from you.