Then sees the horrible mess that the FPGA dev tools are, and quits programming forever :)

Sorry, I've just been in a small personal version of hell for the last few weeks courtesy of Altera.

Do you have any recommendations for an FPGA newbie? I've been looking around at boards, but I'm not sure which ones are the good ones.

I'm finishing up my final project for university (which is FPGA based), and I'm stuck with the supplied tools, so I can't really compare different vendors.

All the FPGA tools are closed-source though, and the free versions treat you as a criminal. I'm using Quartus II Web Edition. Altera finally came out with a Linux version, which is nice of them, but the list of annoyances is long:

1. Incremental compilation is disabled. You'll wait at least 5 minutes to try each change.

2. The signal analyzer is disabled. Debugging is a pain.

3. The source code for the supplied Altera components is encrypted.

4. Your design is on a timer, and stops working 1 hour after being programmed into the board. There goes that hobby project.

This is for the trial version, which I supposedly would use to learn. Yet they make learning about as painful as possible. I simply don't have 3 grand for the full version of Quartus.

I can't comment on Xilinx or Lattice, but I suspect the story is similar. FPGAs are hostile to hobbyists.

Oh yeah, boards :) Get a full-featured dev board. Sparkfun has simple breakout boards, but you have to add your own power, clock source and flash for storing the FPGA config, at least, before you can do any work.

Thanks for the recommendations. I love Sparkfun.

Oops, I didn't mean to recommend their boards :) I meant they are not the best choice for starting with.

You'll want something that works out of the box, so that you know the bugs are in your code, not your soldering.

Ahh. Gotcha. Thanks again.