As I developer I always wanted to get involved in Ethereum development but at it's current price it can largely intimidating in terms of gas prices and playing with Smart contracts.
Then I stumbled across the Rinkeby Testnet (https://www.rinkeby.io/), and since then I have been able to interact with an Ethereum chain at no cost, learning a lot at the same time.
This will be a multipart guide on how to get a Rinkeby node up and running and thereafter interacting with it. So first step you will need to grab Geth from
https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/
I grabbed the Windows installer from here (latest as of this post is version 1.6.7)
Once installed you will need to navigate to your Geth directory (C:\Program Files\Geth) and create a new .bat file. Call it something like Rinkeby.bat and put this inside it
geth --networkid=4 --rpc --rpcapi="db,eth,net,web3,personal,web3" --datadir=$HOME/.rinkeby --syncmode=light --ethstats='Test:whatever@hello.com' --bootnodes=enode://a24ac7c5484ef4ed0c5eb2d36620ba4e4aa13b8c84684e1b4aab0cebea2ae45cb4d375b77eab56516d34bfbd3c1a833fc51296ff084b770b94fb9028c4d25ccf@52.169.42.101:30303?discport=30304
pause
Run the bat and after a while block synchronization should start. This bat will run Geth in Light client mode so it wont download the whole blockchain :)
You now have a Rinkeby Node running locally and can access it on http://localhost:8545
Stay tuned for the next part :)