What you need for this book

Obviously, you will need a working installation of WordPress to begin with. The latest version of WordPress is recommended so that you do not miss out on security updates.

You will also need to install and activate the WordPress REST API plugin on your site. Free download and installation instructions are here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/rest-api/.

At least PHP 5.4 or higher is recommended. The latest supported version of MySQL is required as well, and enhancements such as MariaDB are also allowed.

You can run WP on a generic LAMP or WAMP stack. For further instructions, consider reading the WordPress documentation.