Like, 8 years ago I got a Spartan 3E board and a book on VHDL programming that didn't exactly use the exact board I had. And that seemed to work -- you'd plug i

Like, 8 years ago I got a Spartan 3E board and a book on VHDL programming that didn't exactly use the exact board I had. And that seemed to work -- you'd plug in via USB. I ran some Xilinx software on an EeePC. The act of learning was more about I/O to peripherals than just implementing algorithms on an FPGA. So that's how my experience went. I don't know whether modern resources are more or less computation-heavy.