[Joe Ross]

At school, we used Altera UP-2 boards. Unfortunately, I think they will sell them only direct to schools.

It was nice because it had both Altera Flex FPGA and a Altera MAX CPLD, which made it much easier to experiment with the differences between the two architectures. It also came with a book that had plenty of tutorials (both with schematic capture and VHDL) and projects for the UP-2.