Is the iPhone SDK easy enough for a person who has no experience in software developing?

No, not at all.

If you want to break into programming for the iPhone/Touch, you’ll need these basic steps:

• C or C++ proficiency
• Objective-C, which builds upon the C foundation
• Getting used to the iPhone software development kit.

The iPhone OS SDK is very similar to the SDK for Mac OS X. It is in no way drag and drop or ‘quick build’ if that’s what you’re under the impression of, you will need to learn about interfacing with Cocoa and the associated iPhone APIs, and a knowledge of the programming language Objective-C will be required.

To get an idea of how hard this will be, you could have a quick browse of a beginners’ Objective-C tutorial (http://cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000082.php) and Cocoa Dev Central (http://cocoadevcentral.com/) will help you to learn about the general development process itself.

Apple’s Developer Connection (http://developer.apple.com) is useful for finding out API information once you have a good understanding of Objective-C.

A friend of mine—a Mac developer who makes his living off app development—says it took him around a year and a half before he had a good understanding of the dev process and was not continually going back to reference books and manuals.

I second what richardhenry and glial say.

Software development on the whole will take you at a minimum three or four years of work to become reasonably proficient. And then it will take you somewhere between six months and two years to become proficient enough with Cocoa to be productive in it, depending on what other frameworks you’re familiar with.

And that’s assuming everything goes well; if you pick up some bad habits that you have to work on unlearning, you could be looking at twice that.