Surfpool is the best place to train before surfing Solana
TL;DR
surfpool is to solana what anvil is to ethereum: a blazing fast in-memory testnet that has the ability to point-fork Solana mainnet instantly.
Design
surfpool uses the low level solana-svm API through the excellent LiteSVM wrapper: https://github.com/LiteSVM/litesvm.
This approach provides greater flexibility and significantly faster boot times.
surfpool is also available as a library on crates.io - facilitating its integration in other projects.