Learning material recommendation for implementing a private blockchain

Hello everyone. I recently got interested in cyber security, especially in public key cryptography and Blockchain. I plan to learn through hands on experiments. There are two questions and I will be grateful if anyone answers them.

1. Is there any hands on guide or tutorial? I have found some tutorials on popular education sites like Coursera, Udacity but they are very pricey.

2. To run a very light private/consortium Blockchain with smart contracts, what tools do I need? For example, can I deploy multiple nodes on my own PC? Can I use multiple virtual machines as nodes?

Thank you.