These are microcontrollers, and essentially their beauty is in their lack of operating system. If you really like tweaking your system, you'll LOVE have total control over this processor. Do you know C well? If not, learn it (
see this helpful page on FIRSTwiki). I highly reccommend "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie, because it's very well written and is essentially THE book on the topic. It's also a really great refrence.
This is not actually "normal" C, but rather C18, a stripped down version. It's actually quite close to normal C, and has everything you need. All the information on the C18 standard (and it's use on the microcontrollers) you could ever need is in the whitepapers
here.
Be sure to read and understand the defualt code fully, when it is released this saturday (Excited yet?
).
When you're feeling confident, go to the whitepapers section of this site and read the paper on interrupts, which is really great. The quaderature whitepaper is also useful.
If you need any help, IM/Email me without hesitation (click on my username above to get contact info). Oh, and while it's not terribly useful right now,
the Code Repository will soon be very useful. Glad to have you on board.