What you need for this book
It's enough if you have a modern browser and a text editor to run the examples from the book. It maybe helpful, however, to use a browser tool similar to Firefox Scratchpad (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Scratchpad) to edit the sample code directly in the browser. The books also contains ES6/ES7 code examples that rely on features not yet available in browsers. You can run these examples in Babel.js's online sandbox available at https://babeljs.io/repl/.
You will find detailed instructions of how to set up your development environment and install the required tools and dependencies in the chapters where we refer to Node.js, NW.js, PhoneGap, JavaScript frameworks, and NPM packages.