I can also recommend the PICkit2 programmer, very good, fast, real time debugging in MPLAB possible, wide range of PICs supported, and some other fancy features such as USB->serial or logic analyzer functions are build in.
The programmer is really not expensive in comparison with other comparable programmers. And you can find some functionally equivalent but even cheaper clones e.g. on ebay (mostly from china), or in europe you have e.g. the **broken link removed**, which is also PICkit2 compatible.