The three first PDFs listed on Microchip's C18 product page are pretty good, comprehensive documents about the C18 compiler, which is a non-free addon to MPLAB. Being as MPLAB is listed as the programming environment which we're going to use, I suspect that we'll be using it in conjunction with C18, to program the controller. The
User's Guide contains a lot of the language specifics, while
Getting Started provides a nice little introduction, including a couple code examples (though there are enough of those in the User's Guide, as well). The third document is an overview of general libraries from Microchip, in order to take advantage of certain capabilities of the processors.
I'm going to be in the teaching position, again, for this year, too. I'm going to stick with the same strategy I had last year, though. Throw the manual at them, and answer any questions they ask me. If they do anything that looks like it'll damage anything, I'll try to let them know before they run it.
