Intrigued by FPGA's capabilities, when checking out my classmate's profile http://orangesorter.com/, I started looking into some development kits to learn.

I found great documentation and economical boards starting at $55 available here: http://www.xess.com/store/fpga-boards/

BTW, I also found Scala based hardware construction language Chisel very interesting https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/.