Odoo is a full featured open source platform to build applications. Based on this core framework, a suite of integrated applications was built, covering all business areas from CRM and Sales to Stocks and Accounting.
Beyond these out-of-the-box features, Odoo's framework was built with extensibility in mind. Extensions and modifications can be implemented as modules, to be applied over the module with the feature being changed, without actually changing it. This provides a clean and easy -to-control and customized applications.
This capability to combine several modules into feature-rich applications, along with the open source nature of Odoo, are probably important factors explaining the community that grew around Odoo. In fact, there are thousands of community modules available for Odoo, covering virtually every topic, and the number of people getting involved has been steadily growing every year.
Odoo 11 Development Essentials provides a step-by-step guide to Odoo development, allowing readers to quickly climb the learning curve and become productive in the Odoo application platform. At the same time, it tries to provide good reference materials, to be kept nearby every time you are working with Odoo.