The PICKit 2 is $34.95 from
microchip, and they come
Fully Assembled, and in an enclosure and ~US$12 for shipping to anywhere in the world
To top it off they are driven by USB (so they suit laptops without COM ports), and will program pretty much every PIC out there, **broken link removed**
**broken link removed**
A series of twelve lessons are provided that cover I/O, interrupts, A/D converters, data tables and timers, with an additional lesson covering debugging features. All source code for the lessons is furnished. It's all in Assembler, but that's a great building block leading up to higher languages.
It even has real time debugging support for selected devices.
I believe I quoted $49.95, that’s the correct value if you buy a low key development board with them, but not for the PICKit 2 on its own