Python suggestion is good if you want to get right in to coding...

For native C programming on maemo, the docs are here: http://maemo.org/platform/docs/how-to.html

It's not going to be easy if you have no unix (and preferably C and GTK+) programming experience... Then again, it's definitely not impossible and you learn a lot on the way. If you don't have the development environment yet, start with the tutorial: http://maemo.org/platform/docs/tutor..._tutorial.html

I suggest asking at #maemo IRC-channel at freenode, if you have problems with getting started.