Also, does anyone recommend a particular FPGA development board?
Had it for about a year and a half, works like a charm. Xilinx also had a kit for $100 (maybe $150) that had a Spartan 2 and a CoolRunner II board, which was great in the early days. I think it's since been superseded by a Spartan 3 kit, but I don't know the pricing.
There is also http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-SPAR3A-SK-UNI-G.ht... ($189)
Those Mac OSX users, what do you use for development? The Xilinx development software seems to work only in Windows and Linux.
The absolute best I've seen so far is the Nexys2 from Digilent. It's got the same Cypress FX2 high-speed USB chip and Spartan3E FPGA as the Xylo from fpga4fun.com/knjn.com but it costs $129 instead of $299, comes with full schematics, and gives you lots of switches, LEDs, and ports to work with too. Not to mention a good-sized external RAM (which I haven't played with yet).
I have an Analog Devices AD7760 eval board attached to my Nexys2's Hirose connector right now, and have had a lot of fun climbing the Verilog and JTAG learning curves with it.
I actually know some of the Digilent guys--their cofounder is an adjunct professor at my school and teaches using Digilent boards and curricula. He's probably one of the most busy and productive people I've ever met. As it happens, there's enough crossover between his work as an adjunct professor and his work at Digilent that it's more of a benefit to him as a cofounder than a distraction. It also puts him in a convenient position to be his own first customer, though he has hundreds of universities using his stuff too.