My goal is to learn Pig in order to enhance my resume for machine learning/statistical analysis jobs. I am not really interested in all of the nitty gritty Hadoop details at the moment (although I would love to learn them later-it has just been very difficult to set up on my machine even with instructions, I'm more a stats guy than a programmer). Is there some resource where I could learn Pig, and have easy access to it to for experimentation, without having to learn Hadoop from the ground up?
Yes. Install pig and then run it locally. It can do everything locally (albeit in most cases more slowly) that it can do over hadoop.
For the interactive shell (grunt):
pig -x local
To run a pig script locally:
pig -x local some_script.pig
The best docs on how to use pig are over at Apache, and they've got a pretty good tutorial as well.