I think a cool type of programming book would be a “cookbook” of sorts, in which there were 100 or so “recipes” that each taught a single concept.

iOS-related examples:

• Using online JSON to make objects
• Saving user-created images
• Sharing to Twitter
• Querying a database (most likely using fmdb)
• etc.

I think it would make it easier to break down the task of learning to program into bite-sized chunks that could each be understood inside and out all on their own.