ErnieM. That's terrific. What a great summary!
So at the end when you mention you can do importing into MPLABS to get a pretty good picture of the machine code, the machine code I presume is the binary 1's and 0's? I always thought the HEX code was a hexadecimal notation version of the binary info the machine runs on. NO? I must be missing something then? After all the HEX code gets transferred to the chip memory but is that not the binary program the machine runs on?