[jsolson]

There are basically two companies in this business, Altera (Intel) and Xilinx.

I would not worry about vendor lock-in for now -- there are some quite affordable dev boards (like the Arty (http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-developmen...) I've mentioned elsewhere), and no matter what you pick there's a ton of tooling. The concepts from the tools will translate between vendors, though, even if the commands and exact flows change.

[carussell]

To add to this:

Xcell is the name of Xilinx's self-published journal(s), and it's free. Here's the Xcell portal:

http://www.xilinx.com/about/xcell-publications.html

Here's a short article published in Xcell by Niklaus Wirth after he designed and prototyped a RISC CPU on a Xilinx FPGA:

https://issuu.com/xcelljournal/docs/xcell_journal_issue_91/3...

And finally, it's worth noting that the most recent post on the Xcell blog is one titled "Found! A great introduction to FPGAs", which was written just a couple days ago and is a glowing recommendation for the textbook "Digital System Design with FPGA: Implementation Using Verilog and VHDL".

https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/Found-A-great-...