This book requires very little to start with. If you've got a decent development machine, the only other thing that you need to install and set up for yourself is a LAMP stack.

If you've worked in this field previously, you might be already aware that there are many other variants that allow you to use a perfectly compatible LAMP stack, such as Nginx, PostgreSQL, or something else. You can even run everything in a VPS or a virtual machine sitting on your local hard drive. This book does not come with instructions on how to set up everything as you need, so be prepared to get something up and running before opening the browser.