No, it's not a good place to start! - it's a really bad place to start, why choose a long obselete, overly expensive device, with a low specification?.
By doing so you're just encouraging more people to use such outdated chips, I can see the point that there are ten year old tutorials out there on the net using it, but to write one in 2007 is just beyond belief!.
I would suggest you at least remove all references to the 84 and do the simple changes to use the 16F628 instead - the device that replaced the 84 last century.