I'm looking into building my own programmer (I know they are relatively cheap, I'm just board) and I'm looking at the document titled "Flash Memory Programming Specification" from Microchip - they say on page 5 "The OSC must not have 72 osc clocks while the device MCLR is between VIL and VIHH." Does this mean the OSC1 & OSC2 must be driven by a xtal or resonator or external clock during programming by using either the high voltage method or the ICSP low voltage method?
No, Pics do not need an oscillator connecting ( unlike the AT chips in external mode)
The best diy programmer to build is the Pickit2 Lite as featured many times in this forum, though you need to program its pic first , many very simple programmers around to do just that.
Download the Microchip Pickit2 User Guide which contains a full diagram, though a 'lite' version is much simpler it can still do most fuctions.