VHDL: A Starter's Guide (2nd Edition)

Never even opened it (I opened it, but barely used it) Did well in the class without it. One thing to mention is that this is not a reference book. It is written more as a VHDL tutorial and good for beginners.

VHDL is a rather specialised programming language. It has subroutines, loops, if statements and other characteristics of general purpose procedural languages. But this book goes on to show that VHDL has very specific attributes that let you (hopefully easily) model circuits. These circuits might be combinatorial or sequential. For the latter, the book also goes into how this segues naturally into the idea of a finite state machine. A key concept in circuit design, and one that you need to master. To aid you, the book explains how you can build a behavioural model of a FSM. The theory of FSMs is not really expounded to any depth. An emphasis in this book is on using VHDL to model. You should note that VHDL is not an object oriented language. Though a minor aspect, that of being able to overload a subprogram name, seems to borrow from those languages.

I needed to learn VHDL for a project I had been assigned so I bought this book. Having downloaded a few cores from the Internet, I was hoping this book would teach me how to utilize them. I was disappointed that the topic of "component" was buried in a few sentences. Most topics are way too sparse - the index is way too sparse. The organization of the book is not as good as it could be. To my delight (or dismay after paying the price for this book because they're free) you can download better free VHDL tutorials from the Internet. In fact, these are what I use instead of this book.

This book is not helpful for synthesis at all. Do not purchase it if you will be doing anything related to FPGA or CPLD design. It may be helpful if you're doing simulation only.

This book really lays out all the basics required to program in VHDL very well. It is a great buy.