Up until now, you could have gotten away with just looking at the examples in the book without running them or adapting them slightly to work on your desktop or a test VM or server. At this point, it is really helpful to have a test VM that you can create and destroy several times over as you work through the examples. This is especially true when we try executing DSC configurations remotely later in the chapter.
There are several approaches you can take when building and using test environments. If you have the spare physical machines, you can set up several machines as test servers to run these configurations. This is the easiest way if you have the extra hardware lying around, but it becomes difficult when you want to treat them as disposable machines. Constantly reinstalling the machines will become tedious without imaging software, so keep in mind the time cost this entails if you go this route.