Yes, FPGA design is more like programming than it is like analog electronic circuit design. No need for soldering, or for thinking about analog equations. I thi

Yes, FPGA design is more like programming than it is like analog electronic circuit design. No need for soldering, or for thinking about analog equations. I think a lot of the audience of Hacker News would find it an interesting way to learn more about hardware, even though it doesn't answer the original poster's question about electronics a la resistors and capacitors. If one prefers Verilog, Pong Chu also has an edition of his book using that language. VHDL is more verbose than Verilog, and more strict about typing, which many consider to be a good thing for hardware designs. But at the level of Chu's books, they're almost equivalent--he uses a bunch of re-usable code templates which are easily translated between Verilog and VHDL. It's not worth agonizing about the difference; I chose VHDL mostly because more reference designs for the Xilinx starter kits are written in VHDL.