There's at least 3 paths. Top down, like article recommends, your first project is lines of VHDL code. Bottom up where you learn gates and work your way up where your first project is feeding two switches on a dev board thru a single xor gate and light an LED with the gate output. Systems integrator is also a valid path where you go to opencores and pull a soft core CPU (ranging from totally proprietary all the way up to GPL) and start with a dumb peripheral and make it smarter.
