The best low cost Xilinx FPGA dev boards I’ve found on my travels around the web so far are:
- The Papilio/ Papilio Pro
- Papilio DUO that will be available hopefully in December
- The Pipistrello
- miniSpartan6+ : A Powerful FPGA Board and Easy to Use IDE
The list at http://www.joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards is regularly updated and is pretty comprehensive
http://www.freerangefactory.org/site/pmwiki.php/Main/Books
http://www.fpga4fun.com/
http://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/
http://www.nandland.com/
https://github.com/hamsternz/IntroToSpartanFPGABook/blob/master/IntroToSpartanFPGABook.pdf
http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html
http://www.xess.com/static/media/appnotes/FpgasNowWhatBook.pdf
Buying
http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/default.php?cPath=26_127