Hi,
Its often suggested you start Pic programming with Assembler as this give you a better understanding of the hardware.
There are many good Pic Assembler tutorials for the 16F chips out there - one of the good ones being Nigels ( a moderator of this site) : -
There are many programmers and development boards out there to choose from, but if as you say you are into the hardware, then building your own simple development board should be possible - its just continuation of Nigels hardware examples - for a programmer $35 + carriage buys the Microchip Pickit2 - which no one has bettered yet.
The little picture shows my humble dev board effort - its just got 5 switches, 8 leds and lcd - more than enough for me, and the pic chips are on their own plug in boards so you don't have to rewire everything when you change from one project to another.
hth
Richard