These projects are really fun. On the other hand, you might want to learn in a way that lets you build hardware (esp for FPGA's). For that, I suggest a few types of books with examples:

- Computer architecture or CPU design book covering modern designs with their tradeoffs

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Ap...

- Introduction to Verilog or VHDL (languages for hardware) maybe on FPGA's or well-known boards

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-FPGAs-Getting-Started-Ver...

- High Speed Digital Design (many recommended it)

https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp...

- Cookbook with many examples for FPGA's

I don't have one. Most with these titles are expensive. One that looked promising had bad reviews. I'll leave it to HN to fill in the blanks.

- High-level synthesis

Most exciting one I remember when I stopped researching this stuff was Synflow. I don't know if they're still around.

https://www.synflow.com/

Before that, I had saved Baranov's work which showed how to turn Abstract, State Machines into actual hardware. It was like a how-to on high-level synthesis that he used commercially at Synthezza. I still share them periodically in case someone wants to build an OSS version. I also saw ASM's used in verifying compilers and hardware in separate work. There's a good chance someone can turn many things into a unified, field theory of sorts using ASM's.

https://www.amazon.com/Finite-State-Machines-Algorithmic-Com...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/second-ebook-samary-baranov-h...