Go to http://www.keil.com

There you can download a free copy of their uVision II 8051 development setup. The download is designed specifically with students in mind. This is an evaluation version of the Keil professional tool kit that will work right nicely for you to create test programs up to 4K bytes in size. In either C or Assembler you can learn to your hearts content without any other cost than the web access time to get it. Note that if you use the C51 C compiler in this evaluation version it is also limited somewhat in that the floating point math support has been pulled out of the free version of the compiler too. But for a beginning student there are loads of projects you can do in 4K of code size without floating point support.

Michael Karas