I started to play around with PICs a little while back and found the following suppliers good value for money.

Tech Toys - development/test kits
Kee Electronics - mainly PIC programmers
Futurlec - lots of development/test kits for PIC's and Atmel stuff. Cheap electronic components too.

I'd avoid using BASIC and stick to C or assembler. There are a lot of free C libraries available from Microchip plus of course the free MPLAB stuff.