Answer 1

You probably can without any problem, but if you make some full stuck aplication or some very huge project maybe will have performance problem.
But for learning and making simple aplication it will work just fine.
Just try and see how it work, also close all inactive programs, so you will have better performance.

Here is some post about full stuck aplication on 2gb ram:
https://www.quora.com/Is-full-stack-web-development-possible-on-a-2GB-RAM-laptop-using-HTML-CSS-JavaScript-AngularJS-PHP-MySQL-Ruby-on-Rails-Node-js-MongoDB-etc

Answer 2

Can you use google on your laptop?