How effectively start with VHDL programming or maybe Verilog?

Ok well Ill show you how difficult it is to answer:

1. VHDL or Verilog: They can both give the same results. Verilog is more C like, but has more pitfalls.

2. Altera and Xilinx have very similar parts and are the two main producers of FPGAs. usually, selection comes down to factors such as tool familiarity, FPGA capabilities for your application and who you currently get chips from. This is an altera forum, so the bias is probably with altera.

3. There are many many many applications. From small microcontrollers and address decoders to large real time data processors, depending on FPGA

4. They are not microcontrollers

5. For a start, large, expesive FPGAs can suck in a huge amount of data and spew it out at the same time, after having done some processing on it. The cheaper FPGAs can also suck in large amounts of data, probably at a slower speed.

So - what is your application?