I did this myself about 6 months ago. After much research into my options, I chose Sails.js as a back end framework and Polymer as a front end for building an event discovery app. I spent about 2 months learning the details of both of those frameworks and now I have a very strong understanding of how to program and develop apps (which are actually VERY different; books are good for learning to program and just building apps is good for learning to develop apps). I learned how to develop iOS apps with relative ease over the past month (by working on an iOS app with an iOS developer buddy), so the experience that I gained from Sails and Polymer was pretty transferrable to iOS. So my advice: pick an idea, pick a framework that offload some of the learning curve and development time, and just start building out your idea, using the Stack Overflow community as your guides when you run into problems. Good luck (and more about Sails and Polymer below):

Sails.js has proven to be a really good decision. It uses lots of tried-and-true design patterns from Rails that allow you to build apps very quickly (without needing to understand every painful detail about each layer of the stack) and it's built on top of Node and other solid tech such as Express, Socket.io, Grunt, etc. It's worked great for every application that I've tried it with so far.

Polymer is a very interesting project from Google that is making the Web Components standard available today using polyfills, etc. Web Components introduce a very simple way to build web front ends using components containing HTML, CSS, and Javascript. You can drop a fully-functional tab bar int o your project by adding a simple element to your HTML. There are tons of other options (Angular and React seem to be the most trendy at the moment), but I like Polymer for its simplicity and Material Design components.

I love the playground with its Bret Victor-style approach. I'm downloading Xcode 6 beta now to start playing with it. Now we just need a similar IDE for web development (maybe NoFlo?).

I think Xcode's new playground is the most intriguing part of this release. Swift + Xcode 6 + CloudKit might be just the right mix to get more designers programming because it introduces a) a readable programming language with Swift, b) realtime feedback with Xcode playground, and c) server-side abstraction with CloudKit (server admin being the first and oftentimes fatal obstacle in learning to program and develop apps).

I was just about the start the Design+Code book (designcode.io) to learn Xcode + Obj-C but I think I'm better off just reading the Swift book (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/swift-programming-language/id881256329?mt=11).

"This means developers should not have to worry about managing servers for their iOS apps. Apple handles everything for free, with some limits. For instance, apps can store up to a petabyte of assets on Apple’s servers. Other rate-limits come into play at large scales." A PETABYTE!?!?