--> Fourth, after reading a good deal, it seems clear that building a
programmer, rather than buying one, is a good idea for a newbie like
me. <--

Well, I agree with you on this one. It's exactly what I did. Partly
because the vast majority of programmers available work only on PCs,
and I use a Mac, but also because I wanted to be sure that when
somehting went wrong I could figure it out and fix it myself. I built
a programmer that connects to a standard serial port. I only required
it to program one kind of PIC, which is the one I use for all my
projects.. the 18F1220. I used an ordinary UART for the programmer, so
I could build it without it needing any intelligence. Whatever
intelligence there is, is in the computer. I wrote an ordinary
application to talk to the serial port, using ordinary unix serial
port calls. It works fine. It was fun, too.

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