TI-H: Getting started, AVR vs PIC?

Greetings all, and Grant in particular.

I am ready to start working with microcontrollers, and so am attempting

to do some research on what to buy. Its been recommended to me several

times to start with the 16F84 PIC and a homebuilt programmer. Since I

have been talking to the people on a PIC oriented group, I haven't heard

much about the AVR. I'm wondering how much it would cost me to start

with AVRs instead of PICs, what would be a good AVR to start with (like

what would give me a reasonable amount of onboard programming space,

and be cheap, requiring the fewest number of support chips).

Also, some reasons why I should go with the AVR instead of the PIC

would be nice. PICs have a lot of users, so there is a fairly wide base

of support, free code and a few free high level compilers, which will help

with the learning curve (I.E., I CAN program in asm if necessary, but I'd

prefer to start with something higher level until I need the performance

or size of asm).

thanks

Thus spake the master programmer:
"Let the programmers be many and the managers few -- then all
will be productive."
-- "The Tao of Programming"

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