This is an all-inclusive application that allows you to get started and set up with making your Drupal websites locally. We will indeed use this for the entire book. It creates the URL for your local website as well as the database and Drupal core.
The next two require VirtualBox. This allows us to create virtual machines on both mac and Windows. From here, we can create our separate machines and download OS images that will allow us to install Linux OS, or if you have a Windows disk, you can install this (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).