Popular PIC18F chips in 2016

Hello all...

I am starting to learn the C programming language, and the book I am learning out of strictly uses the PIC18 series, and no PIC16 series. My previous experience has been coding in assembler on the PIC16's, so now I'm a little lost as to which PIC18's to get. If you could please, suggest a variety of chips, from small to large. The project I am working on now will need a smaller chip, it will only have to drive a 5 wire unipolar motor (thru mosfets, obviously) and have two interrupts. A 14 / 16 pin chip would work perfectly. Nothing fancy, A/D, USB, Bluetooth, etc. I find that poking around on mouser's site can be misleading, I'll find a chip that looks like it will do the job only to find out it is very old and no one uses it. What are the popular PIC18 series chips? Feel free to mention bigger chips, I'm sure I'll work my way up to some bigger projects. Thanks as always for this community.

There are no big difference between PIC16 and PIC18. Even dsPIC and PIC32 uses the same language and little bit more complicated perepherials.

hello,

you can start with a big PIC , to avoid later ,problem of lack of RAM or ROM space
The advantage is to keep the same MCU along developpment
because even the same 18F family, there are somme differencies between them, and causes lost of time
to solve details or supposed bugs.

I recently bought 18F87J50 clicker2 board wich has a USB Bootloader .. very easy to use .
with 2 Mikrobus support .. lot of devices can be installed and test on it. WIFI, GSM, Bluetooh, LCD, ...
another chiper board click 18F47J53 with only one mikrobus support..

before i used 18F46K22 , another confortable PIC..

there a plenty other 18F MCU..

forget old 16Fxxxx

Go to to microchips site and look for their chip selector program.
You can use it online or you used to be able to download it for offline use
(you might still be able to - I can't read their website anymore with my browser)