Asterisk: The Future of Telephony
Product Description
This bestselling book is now the standard guide to building phone systems with Asterisk, the open source IP PBX that has traditional telephony providers running scared! Revised for the 1.4 release of the software, the new edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony reveals how you can save money on equipment and support, and finally be in control of your telephone system.If you’ve worked with telephony in the past, you’re familiar with the problem: expensive and inflexible systems that are tuned to the vendor’s needs, not yours. Asterisk isn’t just a candle in the darkness, it’s a whole fireworks show. Because Asterisk is so powerful, configuring it can seem tricky and difficult. This book steps you through the process of installing, configuring, and integrating Asterisk with your existing phone system.You’ll learn how to write dialplans, set up applications including speech synthesis and voice recognition, how to script Asterisk, and much more — everyth… More >>
October 27th, 2010 at 6:23 am
This book enumerates the functions and features of Asterisk, but does little to facilitate deep understanding. I can make the same positive comment about this book that I can about every other O’Reilly book that I own: it’s cheap. If you want a good book, plan to pay $50-75 or more. Good, clear technical writing is very time consuming and sales volume is low. Therefore, good technical books are expensive.
Also, no need to study up on Asterisk. The easiest-to-use implementation out there for free is Trixbox CE. If you want an Asterisk switch you can live with, go Trixbox and buy a book on that particular build.
Rating: 1 / 5
October 27th, 2010 at 7:51 am
This book is not as good as advertised. Particularly when it describes the installation of asterisk and its accessories where there is a mess. I did not understand anything.
Maybe because there are not many books this book has a leadership but this does not make it the best…
Rating: 2 / 5
October 27th, 2010 at 10:36 am
This book gave me the motivation to play with asterisk. It’s a great toy, but capable of being much more in skilled hands. Had I reason to build a serious PBX this book gave me the background to do this.
The information is presented in a clear and logical format with a focus on the necessary concepts and then building your first configuration using the text configuration file. Also covered are options for hardware connectivity to the variety of physical interfaces that are avaialble and issues such as software vs hardware echo cancelling.
Security is covered as well as protocols used in internet telephony. With this background interconnection one asterisk box to another or to a service that supports the SIP protocol like skype or vonage is covered.
For the less geeky there is coverage of various turnkey asterisk packages with gui interfaces to get one up with a basic system quickly and without messing with text configuration files.
This book made playing with asterisk fun for me and it can be an essential resource for someone looking to roll their own pbx with ip or more traditional telephony.
Rating: 4 / 5
October 27th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
The book explains the broad context of OpenSource telecom.
After this broad picture the reader is taken into Asterisk as a product.
I can be used as a “student” manual in training sessions or in self study.
Rating: 5 / 5
October 27th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
I bought the first iteration of this book a few years back. Asterisk has certainly changed quite a bit in that time. This book serves as a great reference for the past and sheds some light on what is coming next. I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in trying out Asterisk or simply wants a good desk reference on-hand for syntax.
Rating: 5 / 5