Since I know nothing about Illustrator, I guess its time for me to see if I can create Matrix code in Photoshop, and hope that the printers can make it look okay. /gulp
I'm sure you'll be abble to find on the net some "matrix code" floatting around, in a resolution suficient for your purpose.
regarding Illustrator, it's not so hard to use, there are really good tutorials on the web. second if your used to work with photoshop, PS is perfectly able to import he illustrator files, you will just loose the availability to scale it as you want, as PS convert it to bitmap.