Hey there!

I want my professional future to be related to embedded system 
developing, so I chose my final university project to be related to 
FPGA.

I've done some work with FPGA using both schematic design and VHDL, but 
I'm still at early stages of learning. Still, I managed to make some 
simple applications work, such as a tetris game on the LED display of a 
Spartan 3 dev board, and a DES algorithm encryptor.

Anyway, what I'm getting into is an entire different beast. I want to 
make a RTR implementation of a control architecture known as RCS (pretty 
much a bunch of nodes that send commands and sensory data to each other 
and process them in different ways at different time resolutions). The 
algorithms in each node will vary, but could be anything from simple 
arithmetic functions to neural networks. I'll be using the Zynq 7000 
ZedBoard for this.

This task is a little daunting for me and I'm a bit lost. My main 
concern is that I don't want to waste too many hours of developement 
time reinventing the wheel. I'd like to get hold of a good book on FPGA 
developement, that teaches me how to understand the relationship between 
behavioural code and the synthesis tool so I don't commit design 
mistakes that will result in area/performance issues, and also that 
shows the basics of RTR.

Anything out there that might help me? I'll be looking forward to any 
advice. On a side note, the ZynQ family comes with two ARM a9 cores. 
Will C be enough to program these or should I start studying their 
instruction set? I've never worked with FPGA/micro hybrid applications 
and I have little idea what to expect.

Thank you in advance.