This is the board I used for two courses in college and I thought it was pretty good. I wasn't limited at all, but my designs weren't anything too complicated.

This is the board I used for two courses in college and I thought it was pretty good. I wasn't limited at all, but my designs weren't anything too complicated. https://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-artix-7-fpga-trainer-board-limited-time-see-nexys4-ddr/ https://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-artix-7-fpga-trainer-b... In my reconfigurable computing course we used the Xilinx Zybo board which has a SoC on it which includes two Arm processors and an fpga (I think the new xilinx boards also have a gpu). This was really cool but I wouldn't recommend starting with it since the dynamic reconfiguring has a big learning curve in itself. I actually don't know what a good way to learn is since I just followed my professors notes which was helpful, but I'm sure there are sources online to help. What I can say is that fpga development isn't the same as software development. You have to think differently when implementing designs since you're literally describing the circuitry instead of designing code that runs on pre-determined hardware. I used Xilinx Vivado Webpack (it's free) throughout my fpga usage.