Ansible has a very low barrier to entry in terms of dependencies that need to be installed into the machines you want to manage: they need to have python 2.6+ or python 3.5+, and you need to be able to connect to the machines over ssh.

One way to get started could be to initially ignore ansible playbooks, just install ansible onto your control machine. Write an inventory file with one or more hostnames of machines you want to manage. See if you can get ansible to connect with ssh and "ping" all the machines. Once you're comfortable with executing one-off commands through ansible, the jump to ansible-playbook will be smaller.