Unfortunately someone who has no access to the EDA tools by cadence / synopsis or standard library files from foundries, cannot really follow along all that far, you are limited to working at the RTL level.
There are several good open source RTL simulators available, I have personally used mostly verilator, which supports (almost) all synthesizable constructs of system verilog and has performance close to the best commercial simulators like vcs. It compiles your design to C++ code which you can then wrap in any way you like.
You should also check out https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/, which is a hardware description language embedded in scala, the nice thing about it is that it has a relatively large number of high quality open source examples, designs (https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip) and a library of standard components available, something which can't really be said of verilog / vhdl unfortunately. As an added bonus you can actually use IntelliJ as an IDE, which blows any of the commercial IDEs available for system verilog or vhdl out of the water.
Another thing I can recommend is to get yourself a cheap FPGA board, some of them are programmable purely with open source tools, see http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/. Alternatively the Arty Devkit comes with a license for the Xilinx Vivado toolchain.