Though this book is code heavy, readers should be able to follow this book, if they have, at least, any version of Visual Studio and MS SQL Server. The book makes use of the following pieces of software:

If you are using Visual Studio 2010 or higher, you should be able to run the sample code of the book. SQL Server 2012 Express is used in the book, but any version of SQL Server up to SQL Server 2008 should work. NuGet is used to download NHibernate, NUnit and SQLite. NHProfiler is used to capture the SQL generated by NHibernate but SQL Profiler or NHibernate logging should do, if NHProfiler is not available. ReSharper is the author's favorite code refactoring companion for Visual Studio, but it's strictly optional.