First I went and purchased: Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
And it said I should know Objective-C
Then I went and purchased Learn Objective–C on the Mac by Mark Dalrymple, Scott Knaster
And it said I should know C
then now I'm at the beginning with Learn C on the Mac by Dave Mark
So this is the long journey I need to take to finally start producing actually GOOD apps for the iPhone
C > OBJECTIVE-C > APPS?
Nah, forget learning C, just go straight to Objective-C. My humble opinion.
If the Learn Objective C book assumes you know C then is it likely to not go into the code in as much detail as you need, making it more difficult for you. However you don't need to learn all of C, or even a lot, so working through a book will take some time.
Better, as silky says, jump straight into Objective-C, and when you struggle just come to SO
If you're a complete beginning to computer programming, I might get some information about programming in general before going to Objective-C; it's an easy language, but it would help to general programming constructs (like if statements, etc) and how they work before you learn how Objective-C does it.
I would think that you WOULD want to learn C first. Most objective-c books are going to presume that you know the difference between pointers and values, that you know basic looping and control statements, and that you understand arrays, structs, and functions.
Contrary to some other advice, unless an objective-c book you buy specifically starts from zero and makes that claim, I WOULDN'T just jump in. People will say that objective-c is easy, but that's not necessarily true, since with compiled languages (unlike interpreted ones where speed doesn't matter so the runtime can hide complexity via abstraction) the devil is in the details.
If you read an objective C book and you don't know what the "*" is for in front of a variable, start with C. My two cents.