Do I need any other books or like a college course in computer
    programming?? I used to program BASIC a lot as a kid, and I understand
    strings and variables and all, but this looks a lot more confusing.

You sould like a good candidate for one or both of two products.

1) PIC & Poke - a visual simulator of the internals of a PIC processor.
   If you're trying to learn PIC assembler from scratch, this will probably
   help.  "Programming and customizing PICs" is a relatively advanced book,
   and I think the commercial version of P&P comes with something aimed more
   at the beginner.

2) The Basic stamp.  Invented by Parallax Inc, this is a small PIC with a
   BASIC interpretter (well, half a basic interpretter) built into it.
   You write programs that look mostly like BASIC on a PC-based development
   system, and then it downloads bytecodes into an EEPROM on the "stamp",
   and runs them.  There are assorted versions of this now, including the
   counterfeit stamp from scott edwards, and a shareware (freeware?)
   "quarter stamp" that turns a 16F84 into an even smaller version of the
   Stamp (using internal EEPROM instead of an external chip.) (But you'll
   have to build a little hardware for this one.)  You can get started with
   basic stamps for about $30-40, which is more expensive than bare PICS.
   (In addition, the basic used is primitive enough that you'll start to
   think like an assembly language programmer, and the next time you look
   at assembly code, it'll make more sense. :-)

BillW