Electrical and Computer Engineering

It's been a decade plus since I touched that stuff. (I worked with Xilinx and Altera FPGAs for a couple of digital logic classes back in college as a CS undergrad.) My memory of writing Verilog is a lot of dealing with the manufacturer's clunky IDEs to type in code, compile it to something that could be either simulated or loaded on the device, and a bunch of poking around at waveform diagrams in the software to try to debug my mistakes. I did not have a very good grasp on the physical structure of the FPGAs we were using, but was still able to program the devices successfully in a class. We did need to specify information about particular pins that we needed our logic to hook up to correctly. The compiler did the hard work of figuring out what actually needed to go where (and consequently ensuring a bunch of constraints implied by the logic are actually met about signal propagation timing). I'd expect the compiler to bitch at you if you ask it to try to synthesize something that ends up being too big to fit onto your target.

Contemporary Logic Design by Katz and Borriello was the textbook we used.