In this chapter, we will cover the fundamental concepts of working with Magento. We will learn how Magento is structured, and go over the source of Magento's flexibility, that is, its modular architecture.

Magento is a flexible and powerful system. Unfortunately, this adds some level of complexity as well. Currently, a clean installation of Magento has around 20,000 files and over 1.2 million lines of code.

With all that power and complexity, Magento can be daunting for new developers; but don't worry. This chapter is designed to give new developers all the fundamental concepts and tools they need to use and extend Magento, and in the next chapter, we will dive deep into Magento models and data collection.