I know this must be asked a millions times and can't be easy to answer as there is no definitive method.
I have been playing around with all sorts of things in Xcode and with Objective-C, however I can't seem to find a good way of learning things in an efficient way.
I have bought the book 'Programming in Objective-C 2.0' and it's great but just lays down the basics it seems.
I want to learn in the 2D game development direction, then of course 3D after nailing that, if that's the right thing to do?
I am 17, last year of school/A Levels and am almost definitely taking a gap year. Any good, well known reputable courses online or offline (real world)? This is my first programming language.
One last question, is when learning things online, I have in the past started building a feature and learning a certain aspect in programming only to find out after adding more its slows down the app or its to inefficient. Is the key to use a certain method in a certain situation (being os many ways to do the same thing) or use any of those methods and refine it in your app to make it run smoothly? Sorry, it's hard for me to know when I have little experience, thus far.
Cocoa and Objective-C Resources helped me a lot. It focuses more on mac programming than iOS.
How-to articles for iPhone development, Objective-C covers the iOS side very well.