http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xebi...AR3E-SK-US

Richard will probably shit himself when he sees this board becuase it is full of "unnecessary" features like an LCD, VGA, ethernet, etc. However, those add-ons are very, very helpful for a beginner like yourself since they provide you ample opportunity to write and test various FPGA cores that use those components in a controlled environment. It's only when you are an FPGA guru that you want a bare FPGA board since you probably won't need any of those add-ons.

To answer your questions:

1. The kit I recommeneded is great because
a. It is sold by Xilinx who is the biggest, most supported FPGA vendor
b. It has a USB-JTAG programming interface built into it so that you don't have to spend another $150 on a programming cable. All you need is a standard USB cable
c. It has a reasonably big (500,000 gates) Spartan-3E FPGA that is the latest generation FPGA in its family. The FPGA is also supported by Xilinx's free ISE Webpack software so you don't have to spend another $2000 on ISE Foundation
d. The documentation is pretty good and includes reference designs, board schematics, BOM, gerber files, etc.

2. Verilog is used mostly be private, commercial corporations. VHDL is used mostly by the aerospace/defense/government industry. It's your choice. I prefer VHDL.

3. Only $150 if you use this board. Otherwise it's the cost of the development kit + the cost of the programming cable + the cost of the software.

4. That is one option. You would store the program inside the FPGA in either Block RAM or distributed RAM and that RAM would be loaded as the device is configured. Or you could create an FPGA core to write the 8051 program into a non-volatile memory outside the FPGA. Once the program is set you would then reconfigure the FPGA with the 8051 core.

5. There are really only two major FPGA vendors, Xilinx and Altera. The good news is that most of your FPGA design will be writing the HDL which is essentially vendor independent. You will have to learn how to constrain, synthesize, and place and route for each vendor, but those tasks aren't hard at all.

6. None. But if you buy an HDL book, make sure it only focuses on synthesizble HDL. Large portions of HDLs are not actually synthesizable to hardware. There's no point in learning all that excess information since you will probably never need to use it. I recommend buying an old, somewhat outdated book by some guys from Cypress Semiconductor that is still a very good reference for beginners learning VHDL.