Ask HN: How can I get started with FPGA?

I recommend Digilent for cheap boards. Much cheaper than dev boards directly from Altera or Xilinx.

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,40...

There are many options. Some of the cheaper ones have little or nor external memory, which might be an issue for some projects even though the internal memories in modern FPGAs are getting reasonably large. Some interesting vendors:

http://www.xess.com/ http://papilio.cc/ http://www.terasic.com.tw/en/

From 4 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902219

(I didn't try it.)

Before deciding on a particular evaluation board, check how far they are supported by the "free" (as in beer) synthesis tools. The high-end chips are almost always excluded, but sometimes random low-end or retired parts, too! Also: Advanced features (support for high-speed serial (SATA/PCIe), embedded CPUs or advanced embedded logic-analyzer) are often subscription only. If in doubt, download and install the tool (several GB) and try to make a dummy project.

Don't start with a complicated board (including DDR-RAM, digital video out, high-speed ADCs, ...) for a few 100$ but try a very simple one first for <$50 off eBay. Your first projects will be very simple. (Mine were and still are.)

Try to learn the command-line tools as early as possible, so that your VHDL (or Verilog) sources are well structured in a source-control repository -- and builds are reproducibly created by make or maybe some build shell-scripts. The integrated development tools (with graphical configuration wizards for everything) are great for exploration, but a nightmare for proper configuration management, they produce way too much undecipherable junk.