programming for the mac

I have been asked by one of my students if he can program on his macintosh. Now one of this that you will need to know is that he has modified his mac to run bootcamp, first with windows xp, and now with vista. He has done this through his own research and has had to re-install many times, and now having learnt backup it is a little bit easier. Next he plans to get a time machine to back up the rest. Now what programming languages should he be looking at. I know there is a number of languages that look at development of software for the web and the iphone, should he be looking at these or at another language.

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/programming.html

has a number of languages and explanation 

There is xcode 2.0 which is a developer framework for the mac called xcode, however the link on the page is out of date, in fact mac has moved on and it is now classed as obsolute.

There is a developer tools page at apple, http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/index.html

Xcode is Apple's tool suite and integrated development environment (IDE) for creating Mac OS X software. The IDE provides a powerful user interface to many industry-standard and open-source tools, including GCC, javac, jikes, and GDB. Xcode is designed to fully support the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks and Java. It contains templates for creating applications, frameworks, libraries, plug-ins, Java applications and applets, and command-line tools. Developers can use Xcode to edit and manage source code, test code performance, and perform many other common development tasks.

there is also cocoa, another language we could look at

Just not quite sure where to point him too at the moment. But the question remains webDEV or appDEV.

Now there is a page that looks at where you want to go when developing for apple, http://developer.apple.com/gettingstarted/index.html 

One here is also listed different technologies for programming in apple. 

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/introdevtech.html

Somewhere for you to start is to look at this site, it has links to resources, software you will need to have on your mac as well as reviews of books that you may need to get your hands on.

http://macapper.com/2007/09/16/guide-programming-cocoa/