If you don't have an extra monitor or keyboard, you can still set up your Raspberry Pi without them. SSH is not enabled by default on Raspbian, but with just a few steps we can fix that.

• Follow official guide to install Raspbian on an SD card,
• Eject the card and put it back into the card reader,
• Access boot partition on the card,
• Create an empty file named ssh in the root directory of said boot partition,
• Eject the card and insert it into your Raspberry Pi,
• Connect Raspberry and your home router with an ethernet cable (you only need to do it once),
• Boot up your Raspberry by plugging power in,
• Find Raspberry's IP address. There's plenty of ways to do that. If you have access to your home router, you can see it on your device list, otherwise just Google it,
• Once you know the IP address, open console. For Windows users, I highly recommend cmder and type in:

  ssh [email protected]
  

  Change the 192.168.1.99 part to whatever the IP address of your RPi is.
  When asked for password enter: raspberry.
• Done, you're in.

End notes
It's highly recommended to change pi user's password as your first action. You can do that by issuing command passwd while logged in as pi user and providing a more secure one.

Depending on your project, you might want to set up WiFi to not have to keep your Raspberry cabled in to the router or enable VNC server to have nice graphical interface to play with.