This book is meant for developers, and it is not a development tutorial. It expects you to be familiar with the Python programming language (especially in the backend development chapters), the JavaScript programming language (especially in the front end development chapters). Since the data files in the modules are often formatted as XML files, some knowledge of the XML syntactic rule is definitely welcome. 

Odoo will run without problem on any recent GNU/Linux distribution. In order to simplify the code in the recipes, we chose to  Debian GNU/Linux 9 (code name Stretch), so it will also help if you had some previous acquaintance with the apt-get command used to install software packages, and some notions about GNU/Linux system administration.