You're not going to learn enough of any HDL in a 100 page tutorial to be particularly proficient in it anyway. Trying to explain the quirks of VHDL in a short t

You're not going to learn enough of any HDL in a 100 page tutorial to be particularly proficient in it anyway. Trying to explain the quirks of VHDL in a short tutorial would be a nightmare. The result would inevitably be skipping over stuff rather than explaining it. Coming from a software-development background, once you get into the higher-level aspects of writing VHDL (and I'd assume Verilog, although I have no experience with it) there's a lot of fundamental mistakes you can make in your understanding of how the language is interpreted into hardware. Using their own HDL which doesn't have much more than basic primitives stops people falling into those holes. In my opinion, the hard part of hardware description is understanding the concepts, not the language used. If you've got a basic understanding of hardware description, the barriers to moving to VHDL or verilog will be much lower. Coming from the other direction, I can see large similarities between the concepts in their HDL and VHDL - the syntax may be slightly different, but the concepts are the same.