The only software strictly needed to put into practice the content of this cookbook is the last official Blender release (from 2.73 to 2.75a). You just have to download it from http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender; some Python script may be necessary in some recipes, but for the most part, they should all be included in the Blender package. Eventually, you can quite surely find any missing add-on at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts.

Any particular texture needed for the exercises in the book is provided as a free download on the Packt Publishing website itself.

Not essential, but handy to have is a 2D image editor, in case you want to adapt your own textures to replace the provided ones; I suggest you try Gimp, an open source image editor that you can download from http://www.gimp.org; any other one you prefer is perfect anyway.