In grad school, I took a configurable computing course in the ECE department. I'm a CS guy - I had never done any hardware design before. You may benefit from reading over my short writeups of the assignments: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/ece5530/

I recall that in trying to describe the impact of the web to typical business folks, Douglas Adams compared it to trying to explain the ocean to a river: first, you have to understand that river rules no longer apply. Hardware is similar. First, you have to understand that software rules no longer apply. If you dive into this even a little, I predict you will be shocked (much as I was) how much of your concept of "computation" is tied up in sequential, memory-hierarchy based processors.

Good way to start is to learn one of the hardware description languages. I liked the book by Pong P. Chu "FPGA Prototyping by VHDL Examples: Xilinx Spartan-3 Version". The same book is also available for Verilog, which is another HDL. Later on you can take a look into higher level HDLs, since creating hardware in VHDL and Verilog is tedious.