[reemrevnivek]

To learn how FPGAs work, I'd recommend starting with a cheap Digilent board; see http://www.digilentinc.com/choosing.cfm - You can get a simple BASYS 2 board for under $100, possibly under $50. This board is the Arduino of the FPGA world. There are tutorials from many schools, lots of good documentation, it's a proven design...you can't go wrong with the Basys board. It does sacrifice performance for simplicity, though - Notably, there's no RAM except for what's on the FPGA. Go up to the Nexys for that, but if you're just interested in learning Verilog/VHDL, the Basys is a fine place to start.

To learn how these things work, get a job at a company which uses FPGAs. You'll probably never see one of these parts as a hobbyist.

If you're interested in stuff that's actually like this, and want to start right away, then look for a board packaged as a PCIe card. This will be significantly more expensive; think $500 on the extreme low end. NetFPGA is (http://netfpga.org/) is a good starting point if you're trying to start at a higher level. (Note that the old board is 33MHz PCI and the processor is obsolete; you want the 4x10GBE Virtex 5 part if you're looking for modern tools)

[pnathan]

+1 for Digilent. They are a local company for me; they do really great hardware stuff at an affordable price.

The founder of the company is a pretty spiffy speaker as well; if you have a chance to see him, it's worth it.