Customer Reviews

Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Just a note, this book can be downloaded for free from OReilly online. Mr. OReilly also has an interesting blog about the future of distributing books this way using download statistics from this book. I am a bit old fashioned when it comes to reading, so I opted for the printed version. But it is also nice to be able to search the appendix on channels and applications in the PDF version.

As the authors openly admit, the hardest part about this book is to decide what 'not' to include in the book. Asterisk's flexibility and almost unlimited potential are intimidating even for the most motivated. After hearing about Asterisk a few years ago, I was surprised to find so few books on the topic and many scattered around information. Coming from a Cisco background, I was getting spoiled with shining books and a vendor-driven learning paths.

At the time, after read up on user groups, blogs, man pages, and various sources, I was able to get the phones to register and ring. This was very cool for the first 5 minutes, but the system lacked all the standard features that would make it useful. I then spend the next few days trying to get voicemail, conference bridge, auto attendant, and Free World Dialing to work. Long story short, the system stayed as a science project for me while I move on to Cisco, Sipura, SipX, and other products in the next few years. I remain enthusiastic about Asterisk and its potential so I continued to watch for any new publications. Unfortunately, Voip-info.org still remained to be the place with the most Asterisk information, but I often find myself being frustrated by the lack of organization and works-for-me-but-use-it-at-your-own-risk code examples.

If I remember correctly, the publication date of this book was pushed back for almost a year, it remained on my watch list on Amazon mostly because it is from the trusted OReilly. I was disappointed by the lack of detail examples in the first edition so my expectation was low, it sat on the shelf for months before I start to read it a few weeks ago. Boy was this an improvement from the first edition! It starts to fill in gaps for me right away and by the end of chapter 5, I feel it is already worth the money paid for the book because it has enough information for a basic working system. The concepts are clearly explained and the codes are simple and to the point. It does not attempt to cover all the information because it cant, but it lays down a nice foundation for you to build on. I honestly wish I had this book a few years ago.

Like anything that is worth learning, you need to spend time and energy if you want to be good at Asterisk. What this book did was to lessen the slope of the learning curve. I highly recommend this book, if nothing else, download the PDF version so you can leverage the nice appendix on channels and applications at the end.

This asterisk title is not for the faint hearted, assuming you have a working knowledge of linux and not afraid to jump in to some command line configuration. That said, there is some great explanation for basic set up to advanced features and to hook up to various VoIP providers.

From my perspective I was hoping for more details such as configuring time conditions for holidays and things of that nature, so I felt the book stopped before it covered topics I wanted. For what it does to, it does it well with detailed examples and descriptions as to why things work they do.

Don't look for this title to be a novice walk through guide, but if you want some good reference for setting up your own small to large business installation having this book on hand is a good idea.

I'm enjoying the book and learning a lot from it, but this newest edition has some editing problems, such as typos:

Page 99: "providers may insteadSession Initiation Protocol" - and I don't know enough about the subject yet to figure out what they meant to say

and logical errors:

Page 71: "if you want to build an IP-only configuration, you can skip to the section on configuring SIP." - but if you do, expect to be coming back to this page because you'll have skipped over some important stuff and will have no idea what's going on

But these are comparatively minor problems with an otherwise great book.

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.

Very great item and quality book. Shipping was very good and was quick. The item met the needs very good and it was just as I expected.Nice

This was a great read! If you want to start your own ITSP, check out Bicom Systems' white paper:[...] Enjoy!

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...

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.

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.

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.