microcontrollers

has anyone here ever used one of these, if so do you have any beginner tutorials??
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=69

I have used them all since its my daily job and hobby too..I would suggest if you are beginner to try this, so you can get easy start and at same time ability to write some really interesting code for your PIC Micro's.. try this..

http://www.melabs.com/products/pbc.htm
http://www.rentron.com/PicBasic2.htm

so what kind of stuff can u use these for?

thats programming languages for feeding PIC microcontrollers on easy way, for any purpose you want...of course, depending on your needs and what you want, you have to build surrounding electronics around your Pic micro, but that something what should be reasonable to expect...what would you like to do with it on the first place? It will be easy to give some guidance if I know what you really want..

I would suggest starting with arduino, there are plenty of examples of what you can do with it. It is not PIC but the direct concurrent, AVR.

http://www.arduino.cc

Do a search on John Morton, David Tait and Myke Predko with 16F84 or microcontroller, regards, BP.

The MPLAB development environment is free and has a good simulator.

Work with PIC's quite frequently and use MPLAB, which is pretty straight forward.

Also like the Hi-Tech C PIC compiler which I can use on both Ubuntu & Win for the higher spec PICs.

What are you intending to do with it?