Each microcontroller (MCU) family has its strong and weak points. I incorportate Microchip, Atmel, Silicon Labs, TI and other manufactures MCUs in my commercial embedded systems development and base my choice of a particular MCU on several factors including desired features/peripherals, price point, availability, etc.
The Microchip PIC is as good as any MCU to beginning learning embedded systems design and programming. Both Assembly and C language programming have their place and I would strongly urge you to study both languages. The PIC16F midrange family of MCUs have only 35 different instructions, so learning the purpose of each instruction in the case of a RISC MCU like the PIC is not a daunting challenge. To achieve some tasks like accurate time delays and high optimized routines still require the use of Assembly language, while the balk of the coding can be done in C language.
The best tutorials I have found online are the following:
**broken link removed**
The cover both the baseline and midrange PICs using both Assembly and Hi-Tech C. They are very professionally done and very informative, much more so than most books on the subject. Each lesson is in PDF form with the required source coded available for download as well. Best of all they are entirely free. Both the Microchip Assembler and Hi-Tech C Compiler are installed by default with the Microchip MPLAB IDE installation.
You can either purchase an inexpensive development board from Microchip or simply breadboard the lessons using just a few various PICs.
Hope the info and insight help,
BigDog