Howdy Gartmorn! Welcome to the forums!
Yes, a PICKIT3 is all your going to need to get up and running with PICs. But if you ever want to program the more advanced PICs (aka 16 or 32 bit), the PICKIT3 might not be the best choice. I have found that it gets quite buggy and slow when you do anything with them. I would recommend the
MPLAB ICD 3 if you want to work with the more advanced ones. I haven't actually used it, but I have heard good things about it.
If you have no experience with programming in C (I'm assuming that's how you want to program your PICs?), then I would recommend that you pick up a copy of the book "C for Dummies All in one desk reference" (Don't get the plain "C for Dummies" book, as it doesn't have enough info). The book mostly teaches you how to program a computer in C. If you read to the "Disk drive C" chapter, you'll be more advanced than the average PIC C programmer, and if you read it all the way through you'll be ready for almost anything (The reason I say this is because the book is actually 800 + pages
).
Programming a PIC is only a wee-bit different than programming a computer, so to get up and running with them I would recommend the
http://www.gooligum.com.au/shop/PIC-tutorials set of tutorials (recommended to me
Here - You might have a read through that thread also, it's the one I started when getting started with PICs
).
As for a software, I would recommend the latest version of
MPLAB X for a IDE, and for a compiler I would recommend the
MPLAB XC line made by microchip.
Dan
