PIC programming

http://brunningsoftware.co.uk/picourse.htm. This is a good course. Aimed at complete beginners, it's weel worth a go.

If you haven't already, go onto the Microchip website and download a variety of the application code that they have covering all sorts of tasks and designs. Read the code and figure out what it is doing. Decide on a project for yourself that is simple, get the bare essentials and make it work. Everybody starts by looking at examples of programs and ways that others have done things. Don't worry about trying to code PICS's in C. Maybe later if you're doing a really big project it might be useful but for most of the applications for which PIC's are best suited you don't need or even don't want to use C. Also go back through hobbiest magazines. Many of the projects are PIC based and you can see how other people have used them. But until you take on a project of your own and actually make the mistakes and then fix them you can't really get your feet wet. Good Luck!

In my experience you can do just about everything you will probably ever need to without using C. The difference comes when doing floating point operations, this is much easier in C. I have mostly used PIC Basic Pro from www.melabs.com for $250 and would definately recommend it. You will save an enormous amount of time vs. assembly and if you really need to do time critical operations you can insert sections of assembly code right in with the rest of your code. My vote is for PIC Basic Pro.