To get the most out of this book

To fully enjoy Blender and all the capabilities of advanced real-time graphics, you should install all necessary drivers and updated software for your graphics card. For the first four chapters, the book uses Blender 2.80 alpha 2 as a basis, while later chapters use Blender 2.80 beta. You will find minor changes in the UI between both versions, but you probably won't encounter any problems following the book with all future versions of Blender 2.8x.