[clug] Seeking USB and FPGA books plus dev board

[jm]

I'm replying to myself to provide a summary to date.

I've currently leaning towards the "FPGA Protyping by X Examples: Xilinx 
Spartan-3 Version" where X is either Verilog or VHDL (see 
http://academic.csuohio.edu/chu_p/rtl/ )

There's also these two Spartan-3E based boards which may match the book 
above. I've got to look in to this further before saying it works with 
the book,

Basys2  FPGA Board  USD 79.00 (Academic USD 59.00)
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,790&Prod=BASYS2

Nexys2 FPGA Board  USD  149.00 (Academic USD 99.00)
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,790&Prod=NEXYS2

While I can't find the one Bob is talking about I did find this one,

Spartan-6 LX9 Dev Board USD 89.00
http://www.avnet.com/     ( no good link for direct linking )
http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/AES-S6MB-LX9.htm

As to the USB stuff I'll take a look at all the links suggested as there 
doesn't seem to be a good book in existence. It may very much be a case 
of hands on learning. Grabbing an AVR or other microcontroller based 
board and starting with some existing code in a monkey-see-monkey-do 
learning.

The ARM based boards with on-board FPGA at 
http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/arm-sbc.php look promising for when 
the 8-bit controllers don't provide enough grunt and a custom board 
isn't justified. They look to be a lot cheaper than a few years ago, but 
this could just be my imagination.

Jeff.