What you need for this book
To follow along with this book, you need an installation of Drupal 8, preferably in a local development environment. There's some good documentation about setting up a local development environment at https://www.drupal.org/setting-up-development-environment. Specific system requirements for all Drupal versions are listed at https://www.drupal.org/requirements.
To follow the code examples, you will need a text editor or an IDE. There's a good list of suitable software at https://www.drupal.org/node/147789.