I found "FPGA prototyping by VHDL examples" book by Pong P. Chu to be 
very helpful.  Prior to this, I bought "the designer's guide to vhdl" by 
peter ashenden and pretty much hated it after while - it is much more of 
a wordy, academic oriented text, vs. focused on creating synthesizable 
circuits for the real world.  "Circuit design with VHDL" by Volnei 
Pedroni was better, but still not sufficient IMHO.

I also have to admit I'm (a) pretty bad at VHDL and (b) find it kind of 
mind-bending and difficult.  I've programmed in C/C++ for more than 20 
years and have done hardware (digital and analog) for 10, but this is 
really something different.

Also, after all this, it seems that Verilog is a better "language" to 
learn.  In the bay area, there is definitely more job descriptions with 
verilog than VHDL, and Verilog seems to be used more for large-scale 
systems and delivery of IP.

My 2c.
J



Jonathan Hallameyer wrote:
> Hello all,
> My boss at work has decided that he wants to start working with FPGA's and
> CPLDs and possibly send some of us to a training class for programming
> them.   Nothing too large at the moment, our sister organization uses Xilinx
> CoolRunnerII's and that should be suitable for us also.  Is there any
> training courses, for programming CPLDs and FPGAs (presumably VHDL, though
> not a requirement)  that anyone would personally recommend? Travel isn't too
> much of an issue, just keeping it in CONUS would be adequate,  east cost
> preferred.   Also, any recommended reading for an FPGA newbie that just
> knows just about nothing about them software/programming wise?
>
> thanks
>
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