- if you have a programming background, read up on objective-c
from the docs on apple site
Then jump into this book. It was certainly helpful for me
to understand how interface builder and objective-c interactive.
The book helps understand that very well.
Also some of the example for navigation bar, tab bars, animation were helpful also. To get more familiar after reading this book,
go to the class library reference or the reference docs from apple.

Main-memory databases in the early 90s were figured out the issues when all pages can be accessed in constant time. A solid state
disk characteristics is no different from main memory.

See http://www.bell-labs.com/project/dali/ for one of such projects.