How to delve into Magento Enterprise development?

Question

I'd like to start out studying Magento Enterprise development. Is there a legal way to obtain a free Enterprise distribution for non-commercial purposes - other than getting employed as a Magento developer at a company which works with Magento EE?

Is there any other resource, apart from the Enterprise User Guide on the topic?

Answer 1

No I don't think so you can get it for free by any way. But you can take some freelance work from Enterprise client, maybe by offering them cheap service for first time for small project or something you can deliver, and then use that project for learning purpose in your local machine.

I would first suggest to work extensively on Community edition though, when you are confident enough in working on CE then you will surely get Enterprise projects which you can explore then.