diff --git a/docs/README.md b/docs/README.md
index d7652e921f7df13d28f9774dfdb6c802a1717f03..50209896f986c5c048ee7ef1eaebd13196996e7d 100644
--- a/docs/README.md
+++ b/docs/README.md
@@ -8,6 +8,16 @@ Read on to learn more about viewing documentation in plain text (i.e., markdown)
 documentation yourself. Why build it yourself? So that you have the docs that corresponds to
 whichever version of Spark you currently have checked out of revision control.
 
+## Prerequisites
+The Spark documenation build uses a number of tools to build HTML docs and API docs in Scala, Python
+and R. To get started you can run the following commands
+
+    $ sudo gem install jekyll
+    $ sudo gem install jekyll-redirect-from
+    $ sudo pip install Pygments
+    $ Rscript -e 'install.packages(c("knitr", "devtools"), repos="http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/")'
+
+
 ## Generating the Documentation HTML
 
 We include the Spark documentation as part of the source (as opposed to using a hosted wiki, such as