BeMicro FPGA-based MCU Evaluation Board

I bought my BeMicro some months ago and I did that tutorial lab from Arrow. But only now I got the time to try to develop something by myself. I am trying to learn programmable logic and how to use FPGAs by myself, but I am having a hard time finding material to start doing so with BeMicro. It seems to me that this is not a good choice for a complete newbie in this scene.

I tried following this tutorial now: http://www.altera.com/literature/tt/tt_my_first_fpga.pdf and I got stuck in the "Assign the Pins" step. Everything went just fine, but the pins I created just don't show up in the pin planner. But that doesn't seem to be the worst problem to me. Even if I can assign the pins, I'm not sure how I will adapt the button pin to the BeMicro. I thought about using the serial communication, but I don't know how I would do this.

I have only the BeMicro board, no connector, nor protoboard. Is it possibile to do something to learn how to use FPGAs only with this or if I should get at least the connector.

Thanks,

Daniel Franch