I am new to HBase, recently I installed HBase and tried to start it on my Mac. Everything is fine and I could play with HBase. In some articles, it said I should start Hadoop first when using HBase, I am wondering if this prerequisite changed?
Hadoop is not a hard requirement for HBase unless you are running fully distributed which you are not. Running on a single node like you are you can use the local filesystem. See HBase run modes: Standalone and Distributed for more information.