I have used the MCP2515 can controller with the 16F877. I have a master LCD display head in a prototype aircraft that is fed signals from about four different PIC based sensor units throughout the aircraft. I used assembly interrupts to handle message reception for the most imortant messages, and poll for the rest. The assembly routine puts the data from the most important messages into a memory bank directly, and the polled data is placed into a buffer.

Being assembly, it's not the easiest to follow, but it certainly works well enough. Still interested?