It will enable you to write real code for an FPGA using a subset of normal F# with some parallel programming semantics. You can download it here. That is, you can write normal F# code and calculate some result as a regular F# program on your pc, then compile the code for the FPGA and see the same output on an FPGA. It's ideal for a software programmer like yourself who wants to get started with serious FPGA programming. There are many good books on verilog and VHDL. For VHDL one of the best is Peter Ashenden's "The Designer's Guide to VHDL". For verilog a good book is Vranesic and Brown's "Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Verilog Design" (they also have a similar book for VHDL).

Xess has a good Xilinx-based started board and great tutorials. As other's have mentioned, Digilent also has some good starter boards. The company was started by a couple of professors from Washington State University. A course that one of them teaches (Clint Cole) has some excellent tutorials on FPGAs. Make sure you get a board with a VGA interface and check out some of the classic arcade game projects implemented on an FPGA (eg, fpgaarcade.com). Enjoy!

Avalda helps developers work on parallel programming with a compiler that transforms a subset of F# to a hardware description language (HDL) suitable for FPGAs. So you can code regular F#, with parallel semantics, and run it on an FPGA. This approach uses the truly fine-grained parallelism of FPGAs (eg, Xilinx's million gate Spartan 3 FPGA). It works with the free Visual Studio 2008 shell (integrated mode). More info can be found at the following urls: http://www.avalda.com/index.php/blogs/12-avalda-fpga-developer-for-the-working-programmer.html http://www.avalda.com/index.php/blogs/15-f-to-fpga-tutorial-on-euclids-greatest-common-divisor-algorithm-part-i.html FPGAs are great for accelerating algorithms in, eg, DSP. So check it out!