Creative Commons

I corresponded with Fabrizio Tappero yesterday and he tells me that hardcopy versions of Free Range VHDL will be available in a couple of weeks. As I wrote previously, this introductory VHDL book is open-source and freely available on the net. Naturally, the authors received a lot of feedback from readers which they used to spiff-up the text before rolling the printing presses.

A new VHDL textbook was released a few days ago. *Yawn*, right? There's like a hundred of those on Amazon already.

But the good thing about this one is that it covers the basics of using VHDL in a concise and attractive 129 pages. It goes over the syntax and semantics of the language and illustrates behavioral and structural description styles with an emphasis on synthesis. But you don't have to take my word that this book is good - you can download Free Range VHDL for free!

I'm writing a new book about doing FPGA design using Xilinx ISE WebPACK and the XuLA board. I've reproduced the preface for the book below. Here are the important points:

• I'm currently writing the book. New chapters will be released as I write them. There are currently four chapters available that cover FPGA basics, ISE compiler flow basics, entering VHDL, synthesizing, simulating, implementing, downloading and running a simple LED blinker design. Additional planned topics are listed in the preface.
• The book is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported license and stored on Github. So anyone can grab it, modify it, sell it, or whatever as long as they leave the other author names and affiliations intact and offer it freely with the same rights they got.
• I'm using FOSS tools like LibreOffice/OpenOffice and Inkscape for creating the text, so nobody will have to buy any tools if they want to modify it.