The basic concepts are timeless but the tools are going to be outdated (which is always fun when trying to learn something new, is having to translate it into a new tool... groan.) The RTL should still work though! It isn't hard to add it to your projects.

For some hands-on experience download Vivado Web Pack from Xilinx for free (Altera has QuartusII, but bench testing might require modelSim, its been a while Im really not sure.) Get familiar with the basics of the tools (Xilinx has some app notes on how to do this.) Try code a few simple hardware blocks in RTL and run through the simulations, see how timing constraints impacts the implementation, and so on. Once you feel comfortable with that you can take a look at opencores.org and look at some of the cores there to get an idea of more challenging things, or you can experiment with embedded processors (more learning tools here.) OpenCores also has a couple open source microprocessors.

As far as true world applications, I have seem some seriously complicated animals out there (PCIe, embedded USB Stacks, AXI Bus...) I doubt those were put together by a one man show.

Good luck.