The Tips in detail

 "Max is a stand-alone application"

This doesn't mean you don't need anything beyond it.

It pays to have a pixel oriented graphics-program like Adobe Photoshop at hand. You will for sure want to design your own textures and / or modify the existing ones.

If you want to work on logos delivered as a 2D-image you might want to use Adobe Illustrator or thelike because Max can work with "Paths" (AI88-files only.) This makes this kind of work a whole lot easier.

As soon as you start doing animations you will want to have Adobe Premiere or something like that to do the cutter's work to get the animations together the right way.

You should have a tool for compressing the scene files (like WinZip or WinRAR) as you can spare up to 90% of their original size. Rar has shown to be more efficent in compressing .3ds-files compared to Zip, espec. with multimedia-compression activated.