Best place to begin iPhone application development/programming in general?

Books, the library, google.com searching for iPhone programming tutorials or just programming tutorials.

Also be aware that you are not guaranteed hundreds of thousands of dollars just for developing an iPhone app. The people that make that much are flukes.

Do you have a Mac? Without one you can’t. The SDK doesn’t work on Windows or Linux.

Buy a book on Objective C. That is language they are written in. The learning curve is really steep. Might as well pick up a book on xCode too. This is something that will be really hard to piece together from random tutorials on the Internet.

Could what you want to make be done in a webpage that is formatted for the iPhone? The barrier to entry is a lot lower if you go that route.

there are some companies that have built software that are the iPhone developers equivalent to the Adobe suite, but they start around $2,000–4,000. You would still need to learn design basics, but the actual development is made very simple. I will try and find the links and post them as soon as I can.

try icodeblog.com for some great tutorials and walkthroughs. One of the best sites I have found for tuts

Just as a sanity check: if you’re starting from scratch, it will take you at least two to three years to become a reasonably competent programmer. And the most efficient way by far is to take classes in it—if you try to teach yourself, you’ll learn a lot of things quickly, but you’ll also learn a lot of bad habits that you then need to unlearn.