I did not drain the coolant before hand. My first evening was spent mostly prepping for the job by getting the truck as high off the ground as possible, removing plastic and metal splash guards under the vehicle, removing the right wheel and a section of the wheel liner and removing the fan (which I didn't need to do). At this time I un-fastened a couple hoses to let the coolant drain.

The must have tools for the job was the E-12 and E-8 torx sockets, 10 inch long pick tools (to unclip the hose fasteners). I would also recommend an E-12 wrench to get at one of the water pump bolts that I struggled to get the socket on. Of course you will also need some other fairly standard tools like screwdrivers and metric sockets.

Other than that, pretty straightforward. I would watch the You Tube video I linked a couple of times. It shows every step in a pretty straight forward manner and I followed it pretty much all the way.