Help Learning FPGA's

Hello,

I'm a 26y/o electrical engineer who has had a solid 3 years of hardware experience in the field. I haven't touched code since college I have been a little lost as to what I'd like to specialize in and recently my step father(another EE) told me FPGA's are a great thing to specialize in. And they are in high demand which makes them even more attractive.

I'd like to learn as much as I can about the topic and actually start doing some designs to see if it's right for me. Can anyone point me in the right direction as to where I start this en devour. There is a lot of information online but are there any respectable textbooks as well? Also is there any one website which is the guru for FPGA's. My step dad is grabbing a Xilinx dev board today for me to start and play with.

Also I'm open to any cool/insightfull example projects I could try on my own. To be honest anything you think could help a guy just starting out in FPGA's would be very helpfull.

Thanks!!!

-mike

I just took an EE course which used the Altera DE1 board. I highly recommend it.
Terasic - Main Board - Cyclone II - Altera DE1 Board

The recommended course literature was "Circuit Design with VHDL" by Pedroni.
Amazon.com: Circuit Design with VHDL (9780262162241): Volnei A. Pedroni: Books