PIC Programming Help?

I've come up with a project for next year's holiday display, and I think I might want to build 7 or 8 copies of a single microcontroller circuit. I need to use a controller that's relatively cheap, and it seems reasonable to consider the PIC.

So, I'm looking for good links, either online or books, to get started.

I've never programmed embedded systems professionally, but I've done 3 68HC11 projects, all of them written in assembler, one of them hard real time (but still pretty simple, overall).

I'm also looking for a decent programmer, and perhaps a C compiler.

Recommendations?