I've gone through various self-built programmers, and had a lot of fun
doing it and saving money in the process. You can build you own for
less than $10 in parts, and you can probably scavenge most of the
parts from junk you have laying around (parallel cables, connectors,
etc). I started with the NoPPP, but that is very obsolete now. I have
a version of the Tait programmer, which I love and used quite a bit
until recently. It was very easy to fashion various adapters to fit
whatever PIC I was working on at the time.

However, recently I discovered how nice it is not to have to do any of
that so that I can focus on doing neat things with PICs. If you don't
want to spend a lot of time building your own tools, I'd highly
suggest getting the pickit2 and doing ICSP.  Microchip also sells
adapters that plug in to the pickit2 if your circuit doesnt allow for
ICSP.

Pickit2 is small, has a USB interface, and doesnt require an external
12v supply, and has very nice chip and software support. These are
things most (not all) other programmers in the same price range lack,
and you should watch out for. Despite having "kit" in the name, it is
not something that you have to assemble.

I would also highly recommend SourceBoost as a good and inexpensive C
compiler. Hi-Tech has a very nice limited free compiler, but honestly
if you don't ever plan on spending $800 to get better chip support or
full memory usage its a dead-end trap whereas SourceBoost has an
affordable Pro version.

- Ben

On 3/29/07, Joshua Shriver <jshriver@gmail.com> wrote:
> Good Afternoon,
>
>        I just found this mailing list today so I'm anxious to see the
> threads. I've been wanting to get into PIC programming and general EE
> since I was in college. Now that I have the time and resources I'd
> like to get started.
>
>       What kind of PIC programmer do you all recommend? I searched
> online, and even on ebay there are many listed for under $50.  I plan
> to do this as a hobby so I dont need anything robust.
>
> Thanks for your time,
> Josh
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