It sounds like you are on the right track. I recommend setting up some Virtual Machines on your home computer to start taking what you see in the books and implementing them in your VMs. As with many things the only way to become better at something is to practice it. Once you get into I am sure you will have enough knowledge to start a small project to implement Hadoop with. Here are some examples of things people have built with Hadoop: Powered by Hadoop
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