Basic Vs C
If you know Basic, Use PicBasic Pro. It's excellent. You will get a lot of 'helpful' people tell you basic sucks and C is for 'Real' programmers. Modern Basic is structured. PicBasic allows you access to all the inner workings of the PIC. In addition, it comes with built-in routines that will save you a lot of time. If you truly like to program just for programming's sake, and know C, go ahead. If you'd rather concentrate more on what you want your program to do, and less on how to do it, Get Basic. People's prejudices agains basic seem to fit into one of 2 categories...
1) I remember when Basic was INTERPRETED. C is compiled, and therefore much faster. This is true, but MODERN basic is compiled too. Get a good compiler, program properly, and you'll have an output comparable to C.
2) Some people think harder is better. All these people tend to run Linux as well. No offense to Linux, but if you listen to the Linux geeks, you'd think what I do is absolutely impossible. I run a home/web server on Windows 98SE. It's crashed twice in the past year, and not at all the past 6 months. I don't even bother rebooting every couple of months or so. The key is to get things stable, and leave them alone. My friends with Linux Boxes, installing the latest patches, new hardware, etc... have LESS reliable results.