What are the prerequisites for starting with ROS?

Before getting started with ROS and trying the code in this book, the following prerequisites should be met:

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS / Ubuntu 15.10 / Debian 8: ROS is officially supported by Ubuntu and Debian operating systems. We prefer to stick with the LTS version of Ubuntu, that is, Ubuntu 16.04.
• ROS kinetic desktop full installation: Install the full desktop installation of ROS. The version we prefer is ROS kinetic, the latest stable version. The following link gives you the installation instruction of the latest ROS distribution: http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu. Choose the ros-kinetic-desktop-full package from the repository list.