Symbian C++ programming has the steepest learning curve ever. Just before Stephen Elop burns the platforms, or not, let’s remember the tools introduced by Nokia that tried to reduce it, with mixed results:

• fshell is simply the most useful multi-purpose tool for the Symbian environment: the equivalent of bash + telnet + rlogin + a POSIX-like set of command-line tools. It will drastically reduce your compile-upload-debug cycle.
• Flowella will help you to quickly create mock-up prototypes for market research purposes.
• Qt Creator is Nokia’s biggest bet to save Symbian. Best suited for applications in which 80% of the code involves GUI tasks, to speed up development efforts. Unfortunately, few are the smartphones that have pre-installed support for it and Ovi isn’t distributing Qt apps for Symbian^3.
• Start with Open C/C++ if you are not proficient on Symbian C++ and don’t want to know why there are dozens of classes for strictly the same things.
• Symbian’s source code, which was the biggest open-sourced project ever. Huge but very well commented: if your application keeps on crashing and you think it should work, trust yourself, the bug it’s in the kernel and the source code will help you to track it down.