What you need for this book

You will need some SDK you are familiar with. However, there is no special preference. The content of the book is pretty universal since there is no code accompanying the description of logic and graphic content. The book is mainly oriented to 2D games rather than 3D products; only the two last chapters describe games that are better to be done in 3D. You can use Cocos2D, Corona SDK, Unity, and so on.

For creating and managing graphics, it is good to have Adobe Illustrator; Adobe Photoshop is good as well, but it is better to use it only for additional raster operations that Illustrator cannot afford. Because there is a great variety of screen resolutions and games are usually ported on dozens of platforms, artwork should be vector based (with raster effects turned on), so Adobe Illustrator is a very efficient and handy solution.

3D graphics can be created in Blender, a very popular and free cross-platform editor with a huge fan base.