Anyone wanting to play around with Ansible should really check out Vagrant too. Quickly spin up Vagrant instances (VirtualBox, etc VMs) in seconds to test things. I use Vagrant heavily to test puppet manifests/modules, and have thrown together several screenscasts about Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant and one about Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag... but you can do the same things with Ansible.

See Vagrant & Ansible docs @ http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/ansible.html