Great thread with lots of good answers and perfect timing too. As an HW(board level) guy pivoting into this space just recently here is my algorithm so to speak to get into this space. Please keep in my mind that I have always "worked with " FPGAs, just "Not worked on FPGAs". 1. Purcahsed Zynqberry FPGA from Trenz. Why? For the price you get the best documented FPGA dev kit on the planet. Thye have a great Wiki with good documentation. Do your own research but this is based on my own research. If you want to develope anything with FPGAs, then your options are down to the "X" and "A" companies. Solid toolchain and documentation and communities(Both official and SO). 2. work your way through the Vivado tutorials on the Xilinx wesite. They will walk you through creating a project from scratch all the way upto creating a variety of RTL projects integrting IPs(Xilinx or your custom that you created). It includes its own flavor of simulator where you learn to simulate your designs and perform timing analysis. 3. If you don't have the necessary Digital logic background either get a decent book or enroll in the Nand2tetris(someone else suggested that).