If you want to learn how to swim, you have to get wet. And the same goes for programming. You have to do some real programming in order to learn how to. Take a look at the first post here. http://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/showthread.php?t=44852 It will help you to get started using MPLAB. MPLAB is a free tool from Microchip. Hard to do any PIC work without it.