All, I messed around with VHDL last year. I found this a great book
to learn VHDL best practices:
http://www.gstitt.ece.ufl.edu/courses/eel4712/labs/free_range_vhdl.pdf
The book is free but you can also buy a printed copy at
http://freerangefactory.org/
I started with GHDL:
https://www.fpgarelated.com/showarticle/20.php
and then progressed to a Nexys4 FPGA board. Lots of fun.
Just a few more resources to add to the mix.
Cheers,
Warren
P.S The CPU I built with it:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/Programs/UcodeCPU/index.html