A co-worker of mine is interested in learning Objective-C. He has literally no coding experience at all, so I'm going to try and help him along. As you can imagine, I'm starting with the absolute basics. He is computer savvy, so that makes it a bit easier since I can often hand wave application level topics (like what a 'Group' is in Xcode and how to add files to it for example).
I think that Objective-C is a actually a fairly reasonable first language to start with (compared to C/C++/Java). Xcode and Interface Builder hide a lot of the nitty-gritty away from the user, so the ramp up time to get something fun and meaningful going is fairly short. You still have to take time to understand the concept of pointers and memory management which I think is a good thing. I always have been very conscientious my stack and heap issues and I think it has made me a better programmer. Luckily, memory management is very well defined (here), and the basic concepts are quick to grasp.
My plan is to get him up and running with the basics of computer science and present to him some best practices early on so that if he takes to it like a fish to water, he is got a solid foundation.
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