Beginner Learning Networking

Hello, if this is supposed to be posted in /homenetworking, apologies and I will make sure to delete this post.

My background: I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, but did my best to take programming courses in java, python, and C. In my C course, the focus was learning the intricacies of pointers, memory management, however towards the end we dabbled in networking (TCP/IP, sockets ) and that's where I lost 'it'. So I am trying to learn it again, personal enrichment, not job related.

I have been reading "Computer Networking A top down approach" by James and Keith Ross. I am currently in the second chapter discussing Socket Programming, we have a UDPClient and UDPServer python files that will construct a client-server application. At the end of the discussion we are told to run both programs in two separate hosts. I currently have only one laptop, a dell xps 9560, would it be possible to complete this task if I run two VMs, each one running Ubuntu, using VMWare Workstation (NOT the Pro version). One Ubuntu VM will run UDPClient while the other VM will run UDPServer? I have a suspicion this will not work since both VMs are running on the same laptop. Any alternatives or suggestions?