Now if you want to have very high performance applications through microcontrollers then you need to go to higher and more powerful family of microcontrollers like 18F, 24F series and for them the programming library is different. It is used for programming the microcontrollers of series 16F which will be enough for the beginner users. We are discussing about the Hi-Tech C Compiler library (HTC) for MPLAB in this tutorial. We can write programs for the PIC microcontrollers in MPLAB but the syntax and code depends upon the library, which may be different from family to family and even a lot of libraries are available for the same family of microcontrollers too. Some things should be clear before starting the tutorial. Hence it is called an Integrated Development Environment. MPLAB IDE can perform the following operations : IDE means that the software itself has all or most of the features that is needed. MPLAB is the name of the software and IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. The software for programming Microchip microcontrollers comes by the name MPLAB IDE. But you surely should have a decent knowledge of C language.
All you need is the simplest knowledge of electronics or digital circuits. I have tried to start from zero level in here also. And the guides and tutorials also do not start from zero level which makes learning far more difficult than anticipated. Well it is a bit difficult to start learning microcontrollers.
A lot of you may heard about microcontrollers and its applications.