>Does this confusion typically happen to engineers who are trying to teach themselves hardware design, or is it just an indication of a terribly-designed curric

>Does this confusion typically happen to engineers who are trying to teach themselves hardware design, or is it just an indication of a terribly-designed curriculum? Your curriculum seems very sensible to me, you learned the basics first. After all HDLs are just describing the underlying circuit, you need to know how to design it first. The basis of most confusion in my experience is that for most people (including pure electronic engineers) their "first contact" with anything digital is through software programming which, despite the recent trend in multicores and parallel execution, is highly sequential. When you try HDL for the first time after years of programming CPUs it's natural to approach it with the same thought process. It just takes time to adapt to a new "way of thinking", nothing more. I'm sure if someone learns HDL design without prior software experience will face the same issues when he/she later decides to jump to software engineering