In order to follow the tutorials in the book, there are a few requirements:
Basic HTML/CSS knowledge: None of the examples use very complex HTML or CSS, but a basic understanding is necessary to build proper TYPO3 templates.
Text editor: You won't require any special development software for this book, but a good text editor is handy for creating HTML templates and writing code. I use TextMate on a Mac, but e-TextEditor (Windows), Notepad++ (Windows), BBedit (Mac), or jEdit (Java) all have extensions for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and TYPO3's own configuration language, TypoScript.
Test server: We need a place to run our examples during the tutorial. If you already have a hosted server that supports MySQL and PHP 5.2 (with ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick and GDLib/FreeType), you can use that. This may sound like a lot, but most hosting providers offer this by default. Otherwise, you can run TYPO3 on your own computer using either XAMPP (Windows, Linux, or Mac) or MAMP (Mac only). Both of these packages allow you to run a full test server locally on your machine, and they already include a web server (Apache), MySQL, and PHP 5.2 (with the necessary graphics libraries).
TYPO3 4.4 or higher with the dummy package installed: All of the examples in the tutorial have been tested on 4.4.2, but they should work equally well on future versions of TYPO3. You can download the newest version of the TYPO3 source with a dummy package at http://www.typo3.org/download/. If you have not installed TYPO3 before, detailed instructions are available in the TYPO3 documentation library (http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/extension-manuals/doc_inst_upgr/current/).