This book is based on the most stable version of Odoo, that is, Odoo 12. You should have Odoo version 12 installed on your system. It can be downloaded from https://github.com/odoo/odoo. Most often, it is installed in VMware or in the cloud, such as with AWS:

• Chapter 1, Setting Up Odoo 12, provides the basic Odoo installation steps for both Windows and Ubuntu.
• Odoo now provides quality documentation on how to install Odoo on a variety of platforms, https://www.odoo.com/documentation/12.0/setup/install.html.

Once Odoo is installed, no other software installation is required for the book.

To get the most out of this book, you should understand basic business operations. For example, you should know the purpose of a sales order and a purchase order. You should also have basic computing skills and be able to understand filesystems and install the software. For the more advanced customization topics in the book, you should have basic knowledge of databases and programming concepts.

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781789536898_ColorImages.pdf.

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "First, we define Orders to give us access to the sale.order model."

A block of code is set as follows:

daterequired = fields.Date('Date Required', required=True) 
rush = fields.Boolean('Rush Order') 

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

from odoo import http 
 
class Webrushorders(http.Controller): 
 
    @http.route('/orders/rush/', auth='public') 
    def index(self, **kw): 

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

cd /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/odoo/addons

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Using the quick Create and Edit... option, you can add your finished products directly when creating a manufacturing order."