As others said, there are many families and many options. That is actually something that newcomers in PIC find misleading when compared to, say, Arduino where there are fewer options to chose and that makes decision simpler (although not necessarily correct). If you can afford one, I would suggest getting a Microchip Explorer 16 boar= d and concentrate on 16bits PIC24 development with C30 Microchip compiler. It is a very powerful board with lot of options to upgrade to other MCUs just buying addon cards, as well as daughter cards for many things like SDCard, Ethernet, etc. There are some good books out there to start learning PIC24 such as thisone which is actually including examples and tutorials for the Explorer 16 board. Except you have a specific interest on them, I would rather suggest you to avoid 8bits PIC16F84 and PIC16F877 like pest. They were the only options fo= r starters years ago, but a PIC24 is a much better micro to learn. If you wan= t a 8 bits PIC then I would suggest PIC18F2620 but never a PIC16F84. Hope this helps. --=20 Ariel Rocholl http://www.rf-explorer.com On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 3:12 PM, wrote: > Thanks for the replies > I checked PickIt3.( assuming it must be better than PICkit2). > And it comes with development board( in PICkit 3 Debug Express) > > But also found out that there are more( different) development boards.WHa= t > kind of the > development board should I buy ?Which would be the best? > > Thanks > > > > > Can anyone suggest the best way how to start with PIC programming ? > > > > Depends what chip you want to start with, and what you want to do with > it. > > > > > What must I buy and what software download? > > > > Software to download is MPLAB, which has the assembler, simulator, > programmer driving software, and C compilers for a couple of the families= .. > See http://www.microchip.com/MPLAB for the download link. It is a fair > size, approaching 100MB these days, so if on a slow link it will take a > little while. > > > > You will need to buy a programmer, but these are an acceptable price. A > Pickit 2 or Pickit 3 is a good starting point for a beginner. > > > > > Is there a good tutorial? > > > > There are tutorials around, I'll let others point you at suitable ones. > > > > > What kind of development kit will I need? > > > > Check out the Microchip offerings, there are some basic development > boards that come packaged with a Pickit2 or Pickit3 IIRC. These tend to b= e > very good value for getting started. > > > > > > > > Thanks for help > > > > You are welcome. > > > > > > -- > > Scanned by iCritical. > > > > -- > > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > > View/change your membership options at > > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > > > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .