The book is primarily aimed at .NET developers with slim to moderate experience with Xamarin and .NET Core. The cloud infrastructure-related sections heavily use various services in the Azure cloud infrastructure. However, familiarity with basic management concepts of Azure portal should be enough for the more advanced topics.
For the code samples, a combination of Windows and macOS development environments are used throughout the book. The ideal setup to utilize the samples would be to use macOS together with a Windows 10 virtual machine. This way, samples from both environments can be used.
The IDE of choice for implementing the code walk-throughs is Visual Studio 2019 on Windows, and Visual Studio for Mac on macOS. Visual Studio Code, which supports both platforms, can be used to create the scripting and Python examples.