This book focuses on JIRA development. You need the following software as a bare minimum:
JIRA 7.x+
JAVA 1.8
Maven 3.x
Atlassian Plugin SDK 6.x+
An IDE of your choice. The examples in the book use Eclipse.
A database supported by JIRA. The examples in the book use H2DB, which comes with standalone JIRA.
Some of the recipes are too simple to use the fully fledged plugin-development process, and you will see this highlighted as you read through the book!