The SiLabs board, among others, is complete with C-coded application examples, not that they are immediately suiable for your specific application. Moreover, there are many application examples provided, that will show you how to approach some problems, even if they're not drop-in solutions.

The debugging capabilities alone are worth the price, and, as you've said you're a newbie, it's unwise to consider building your own board, or your own programmer. The SiLabs board is programmable from a module that comes with it, so you don't have to buy anything else. The program memory is in-application-modifiable so you can store parameters and other data in a portion of it if you find that helpful. Further, there's considerably more on-chip RAM than what's on the "standard" 8052.

RE