What you need for this book
Although modern versions of Nginx support Windows, this configuration is not considered production-ready. Most of the examples in this book will work on your Windows machines, but we still recommend having a Linux or FreeBSD server for experiments.
Nginx itself is pretty stable, so any version released since 2013 will suffice. Some of the newer features are only available in more recent versions, and those cases are marked in the book. We always recommend running modern Nginx from the stable line in production. As of the start of the year 2016, it is 1.8.1.