Yes, you would need a shaft for a manual car.
If you are mechanically inclined and have some experience working on cars, it is not an exceptionally difficult procedure, but it is rather tedious (expect to spend the better part of a day) as you have to drop the exhaust system from the head pipe rearward, drop the transmission crosssmember, and remove all of the heat shielding from underneath the car before you even get to the point where you're beginning to remove the driveshaft. If the exhaust bolts between the exhaust manifold and headpipe are rusted bad enough, those can be difficult to remove or they'll just snap and then they're really easy to remove!
It doesn't require any special tools but it does require a fair amount of patience and being mindful of the order in which things are removed and the order in which they are replaced. Preloading the center bearing on installation and installing the front six bolts in the correct directions are about the only special procedures that you need to be aware of (that I can think of off the top of my head).