I had some exposure to VHDL, but only from a workshop I attended and it wasn't really any more than you could get from watching YouTube tutorials. I prefer Veri

I had some exposure to VHDL, but only from a workshop I attended and it wasn't really any more than you could get from watching YouTube tutorials. I prefer Verilog now anyway as it's way more concise. The best place to start is to just grab a book and an FPGA kit and go. You'll probably have to try a bunch of tutorials until you find one that clicks for you and after that it gets easier. For iCE40 you can also check out IceStudio, which is a graphical block based IDE that can be helpful for getting your feet wet. Get some hardware to give you feedback and play with, e.g. a 7-segment display and implement a driver yourself. Watch YouTube videos to get an idea of the general flow of things and eventually it'll make sense. IMO it helps a lot if you have a background in electronics, if not you're gonna be in pretty deep. I use apio because it's convenient. Hardcore FPGA devs are going to use the manufacturer's IDE. The official Lattice tools for the iCE40 are unbelievably awful and there's not much to gain from using their iCECube2 IDE versus open source ones, but in most cases you don't have any choice in the matter and have to use the manufacturers tools. This isn't so bad though, I've had some exposure to Xilinx's ISE and Vivado and they are pretty decent, plus Xilinx gives you access to a ton of free IP cores that you can drop into your design.