This document provides an introduction to Hadoop using the Hortonworks Sandbox virtual machine. It discusses how Hadoop was created to address the limitations of traditional data architectures for handling large datasets. It then describes the key components of Hadoop like HDFS, MapReduce, YARN and Hadoop distributions like Hortonworks Data Platform. The document concludes by explaining how to get started with the Hortonworks Sandbox VM which contains a single node Hadoop cluster within a virtual machine, avoiding the need to install Hadoop locally.