JC_Identity

The worst thing you can do when trying to become a great programmer is to think that you need a book to learn how to program. I used to think that and had to learn the hard way that the whole joy of programming and the proper learning approach to programming comes from having an interesting project idea that you want to build and use. That should be the driver at all times, and you will see that after you have developed a couple of those project that you learned a great deal and had a lot of fun doing it. Now that said, if you still want to use books, which can be useful if you are a complete beginner, I would recommend books that are based around building an example application. In web development one such book is "agile web development with rails". If you want to develop for iOS I would strongly recommend "The iOS Apprentice". This last one is the best single learning resource I have come across ever. The whole course is a joy and you learn how to think as a pro programmer and the natural iterative workflow of a pro programmer. I cannot recommend it enough. I wish you good luck!