I think this is going to be well outside the pricing range for most people to use for an extended period of time, which is necessary for learning a lot. Depends on the specs of the developer AMI, too, which comes with Vivado and everything. But synthesis can be insanely CPU intensive for large designs, so who knows how they'll spec it. It might cost more due to including a Vivado license. And you'll need to do extensive amounts of testing, no matter what you're doing, so be prepared to synthesize and test on "Real World" F1 instances, on top of simulating, testing, etc.

If you truly want to get started with FPGAs, you can do it on a small chip, with an open source Verilog toolchain, and open source place/route/upload. Textual source code -> hardware upload, open source. Today, for like $50! I think this is way better as a tool for educational purposes, and a lot cheaper. Also, you don't have to deal with a giant bundle of EDA crapware.

What you want is Project IceStorm, the open source Verilog flow for iCE40 FPGAs: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ -- you install 3 tools (Yosys, Arachne P&R, IceStorm) and you're ready to go. It's all open source, works well, and the code is all really good, too.

You can get an iCE40 HX8k breakout board for $42, and it has ~8,000 LUTs. Sure, it's small, but fully open source can't be beaten and that's cheap for learning: http://www.latticestore.com/products/tabid/417/categoryid/59...

I think this is a much better route for learning how to program FPGAs, personally, with high quality software and cheap hardware -- just supplement it with some Verilog/VHDL books or so. There are pretty decent Verilog tutorials on places like https://www.nandland.com or https://embeddedmicro.com/tutorials/beginning-electronics for example.