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If you think soldering irons are the devil's work (Hello), don't want to maltreat pieces of cable and your own fingers with a wire stripper, but still feel like designing digital circuits, there are options.

LogiSim in its different flavors or the excellent alternative Digital by Helmut Neemann will get you surprisingly far. Even larger projects are no problem thanks to the abstraction capabilities via modules. But if you want to go back to the hardware world, both tools are not always directly usable, even though they provide Verilog generated descriptions of your design.

And Verilog alone generates real joy, because you can describe very complex digital circuits very quickly with very little code. In short, there's no getting around Verilog if you're serious about building something and to bringing it to life on an FPGA or ASIC afterwards.

One of the best books on the subject comes from Samir Palitkar. The first edition of "Verilog HDL" dates back to 1993, but has been updated again and again by the author. Paperback and hardcover versions are available (in some countries) from Amazon, but here and here you find digital versions. To be fair, those who want to support Samir put some colorful bills on the Amazon sales counter.

The book assumes only basic knowledge, and is an excellent choice to get started with Verilog. Definitely reading material for a hot summer! 😎