1. Prior experience with other server-side technologies, such as Python, PHP, ASP.NET, and Ruby will be beneficial but is not mandatory.
2. This book will require a computer system. The minimum hardware requirements  are 1.8 GHz or higher Pentium 4 (or equivalent) processor, 4 GB RAM, 10 GB hard disk, and a stable internet connection.
3. The software required are Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/), Node.js (8.9.1) (https://nodejs.org/en/), MySQL Workbench 6.3 (https://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/),  and MySQL (https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/).