Terasic makes good Altera boards such as the $100 DE0-Nano series, and Digilent makes a decent Xilinx Artix-based dev board for around the same price. They both have decent community support, but just be aware that setting up the dev environment and getting all of the USB cable permissions sorted out (especially on linux) can take time. It's worth sticking with, though, because FPGAs are a blast to mess around with. The sheer compute power available to you is fun.