FPGA Prototyping by VHDL Examples: Xilinx Spartan-3 Version

I have spent many years amassing a collection of every book on FPGA on the market! Ok, maybe that's pushing it...However, compared to what most books lack in practical examples, this one I find is a complete GEM! From the beginning to the end it keeps you going with interesting, real world examples of what can be done with a Digilent Spartan Starter Kit. The author, Prof. P. Chu does an excellent job at progressivelly building your understanding of FPGA logic design, through a series of chapters that gradually take you to the more advanced stages of design in easily comprehensible lessons that require more elevated skills as one approaches the end chapters. The beauty of this book is that it uses the lessons learned prior to take you to the next level. I've used Prof. Chu's samples and interfaced them with a PIC and ARM9 development boards respectivelly, just to spice in some more fun and excitement. I may be considering launching a free site for the microcontroller sample code interfacing to his functional FPGA examples with his prior consent! There are lessons on dealing with numbers, such as the illusive negative integers and floats represented in binary logic. These are not borring discussions. They are well explained and straight to the point, complete with test benches and some of them can even be ran in the Xilinx simulator. The muxing example for LEDs should be the starting point of all experiments. It's that useful! The chapter on circular buffers is alone worth the price of the book! The memory interfacing and the VGA interfacing are priceless chapters as well! Try looking at a Xilinx sample for memory interfacing! PHEW... I cannot rave enough about the amount of work he has put into this...This is not a lazy approach to book writing! It's methodical, complete, well illustrated and there are samples included and they all work as described in the book! If you are new to FPGA, this book may be the top stepping stone you're after! It should be on everybody's book shelf who deals with FPGA logic design and I'm considering buying another one, just in case I loose the first one...Yes, it's that good! Brilliant work Prof. Chu, please keep em' going! It's people like yourself that make VHDL learning fun and exciting again!