[dyselon]

There's a ton of of dev boards out there, but I would say to be sure to get something with hardware buttons and LEDs, as it really helps with some of the Hello World level of things, and many of the cheapest options won't have those.

I started messing with FPGAs with the DE0-Nano, but eventually got so frustrated with the tiny buttons that I upgraded to a DE0-CV, which I really enjoyed my time with. It has some 7 segment LEDs, physical switches, and buttons, and it also has a VGA port, PS/2 port, and Micro SD card slot, so you can build a pretty snazzy little PC if you want to.