Unfortunately, alot has changed in the SDK since when a lot of tutorials were first written back in April. Also, a lot of the code samples do a lot of the UI creation in code and not through the Interface Builder which the older project templates also did - now they give you blank xib files for you to build your UI in.
Probably one of the better tutorial web sites I know of is
iPhone Dev Central and that may get you started on your way.
Also, I would recommend against using an older beta of the SDK just because it will match what your tutorials show. At some point (and Apple may have already done this with beta 8) you won't be able to submit an app if it doesn't conform to a minimum build number.
Finally, and a lot of people make this mistake, this forum isn't a place to ask very broad "I know nothing about iPhone development, but would love it if you could impart a panacea of knowledge in a couple of posts". I knew nothing about Objective-C and iPhone development 3 months ago, but I did a bunch of reading (yeah, I know, reading sucks and it's a lot more fun to just dive in head first and grope your way through coding until you have something halfway functional) on Apple's developer site on the Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language, Fundamentals of iPhone development, Interface Builder, etc and now I am proficient enough that my app is running beautifully without any leaks or bugs and I'm able to assist other people solve their specific problems on this forum. Everything you need to learn how to develop for the iPhone is there - you just have to read it. There are a lot of posts on here where people run into a bunch of problems (memory leaks, crashes, etc) simply because they didn't read first and could have saved everyone a bunch of time and headache if they exerted a little due diligence.
Sorry for the diatribe, but I'm happy to help with specific problems but very broad questions are just too nebulous to get even a halfway decent answer back.
=Enuratique
