In this chapter, you’ll learn how to install Cassandra and create a single-node Cassandra “cluster.” Once you get your feet wet, it’s an easy transition to creating and configuring a multi-node Cassandra cluster, which is the topic I discuss in Chapter 3.
Once you create a Cassandra cluster, you learn how to work with cqlsh, the command line interface to the CQL shell. By the time you complete this chapter, you’ll know how to start and stop your cluster, how to create keyspaces and tables, and how to insert and query data.
