hi,

I want to learn hadoop. However, I don't have access to a cluster now. Is it possible for me to learn it and use it for writing programs and learn it properly.

Would it be helpful to run multiple linux VMs and then use them as boxes to run hadoop? Or you think that is more of a stretch and running it on a multiple hosts is the same as running in on single host (in terms of setup, Hadoop API used, the architecture of the map-reduce programs etc)

Thanks,