I would suggest Digital Design by Morris Mano[1]. It'll start off with basic intro from digital gates to FPGAs itself! And you really don't need any EE background for this book. This book starts from absolute basics and it'll also teach you Verilog along the way. And verilog is used more in the industry than VHDL(which more popular in Europe and in the US army for some reason).
I'm surprised where you got the idea of using C to program FPGAs, are you thinking of SystemC or OpenCL (they're both vastly different from each other)
I'm really surprised a sibling comment recommended the code book. It really meant to be a layman's reading about tech. It's a great book but it won't teach you programming FPGAs.
Not really. C is considered high level in digital design. There are some tools for high level synthesis, from languages like C but they aren't used much.
Most Fpga "programming" is a textual description of a directed graph of logic elements in a language like vhdl or Verizon (and now systemverilog).
Synthesis engines have gotten better over the years to allow things like +,* to decribe addition and multiplication instead of describing the logic graph of multiplication.
And most Fpgas now have larger built in primitives like 18x18 multipliers now.
You can judiciously use for-loops for repeated structures.
Maybe I should've included this but older versions are not much different from the new one and the more older ones go for dirt cheap compared to the new one.
I'm surprised where you got the idea of using C to program FPGAs, are you thinking of SystemC or OpenCL (they're both vastly different from each other)
I'm really surprised a sibling comment recommended the code book. It really meant to be a layman's reading about tech. It's a great book but it won't teach you programming FPGAs.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-Introduction-Verilog-H...