machinegods.com

The last six months have been extremely busy and distracting. Changing accounts at work and a trip to South Africa among other things have definitely kept me hopping. On a side note, Cape Town and the surrounding area is gorgeous! I could move there in a heartbeat!
In any event, the time has come to get back to work on machines..

I've picked up a Xilinx Spartan 3E starter kit so that I can get some hands on work with chip design and hardware interaction. Getting an FPGA starter kit has been on my todo list for a couple years now, so I'm very excited to finally have it in my possession.
Of course, now the hard part begins.. learning to use it.

Learning to use it seems to have two broad areas of focus.
1. Learning digital design
2. Learning the description languages (Verilog, VHDL...)

A quick search on topics such as learning FPGA will show that most people focus on learning Verilog or VHDL and the usual religious wars that go with language decisions.
This is interesting because it's certainly not the language that is as important as the design it's supposed to describe.
But search on learning digital design and the advice is much sparser.

Most posts seem to suggest reading The Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill.
However, the reviews of the book seem to make it clear that the book is really not a text book designed to guide a person through the topic. So I elected not to pick that up.

Instead I decided to pick up Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits by Anant Agarwal and Jeffrey H. Lang. This book was written as a textbook for MIT courses, and I think will fit the bill nicely.
This also reminded me of MIT's open courseware, which I will have to search out.

I also ordered The Circuit Designer's Companion by Tim Williams, as it seemed to be a good companion resource from the reviews.