Customer Reviews

Developing Cisco IP Phone Services: A Cisco AVVID Solution

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you want to develop IP phone services, this book will really help you. Almost everything that is in here is available on the Cisco web site...somewhere! I spent days searching through Cisco documents and sample code looking for answers to the "hard" questions such as "how do I know which phone is accessing my service". I found the answer in this book in a couple of minutes.

The book is not for web beginners, however. It does spend a fair amount of time giving you some background in HTML and XML, but only at a very high level. Most of the examples are written in ASP, but no explanation of ASP is given. I don't think that this is unreasonable as the book is aimed at people who know how to write web applications and want to target those applications to IP phones.

As the book was published in 2002, it pre-dates the latest Call Manager 3.3 release, and as such does not describe some new features of Call Manager, such as the AXL API. You do not need this information to write most applications. If you do, you can get it here: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/570/

This book contains detailed descriptions of phone-based XML tags, authentication, push capabilities, and many other subjects that cannot be found anywhere else (including CallManager texts). I was a reviewer on this book, but I'm also a user: I relied heavily on this book to help build the application that won Best of Show at the Cisco Convergence Expo in early 2002... If you are doing any development for, or integration with, Cisco IP phones then it's simple--you need this book!

This book is great to get a high level overview of how IP phone services work. However when you get to the nitty gritty of writing an application, this book is mostly useless. Yes, there are lots of examples on how to do very basic things like display a menu on your phone. However, as another reviewer pointed out, there are no detailed examples of how to do anything advanced.
One example, I want to get information about the device hitting my service. There are 2 paragraphs explaining why I might want this information, but on how to get it, this book only says "You can use the Cisco URL Proxy to gather additional information...". No where in the book does it give any more details on how this is used. One more sentence - like 'your service should read these xml pages to get the device info' - would have been infinitely helpful. I found that the Cisco SDK documentation has everything that is in this book and more.

This book contains everything you need to know to get started developing XML applications for the Cisco IP Phones. The book includes step-by-step instructions on how to write an application plus a CD with sample programs and utilities. This is a must for anyone interested in leveraging the full power of the Cisco IP Phones.

I really was able to use the book as a cookie cutter for my own XML services. I found the book easy to read with great examples. The best thing I liked about the book is it didn't bog you down with a bunch of useless facts. The authors got right to the heart of the matter, and explained the steps very well. As a bonus, the tools that come with the book allow you to develop these services with just a PC and a Cisco IP Phone. Great job.

This is THE must have book for developing services for the Cisco IP phones. Just getting the CallManager Simulator on the included CD makes this book worth the money. The simulator makes it possible to develop and test services without needing to purchase thousands of dollars of Cisco hardware and software.

There's also an advanced techniques chapter that describes how to do a lot of the cool features for more complex applications. With the basic-to-advanced information in the book and the free code samples and programs on the CD, this book is a great bargain for the price!

This book has some good examples, but lacks any detail.
It skims over all the complicated topics.
Does not do a very good job at demonstrating how to build applications that integrate a web browser and an ip phone.
Very introductory.

I needed to get an in depth understanding of the way services for the IP Phone were developed so as to develop security policies to help protect network assets. This book gave me exactly what I needed to know. It will be very useful to anyone who wants to develop XML based services for the Cisco phones.

I purchased this book with the intention of writing services for CM ver 5 and ver 6 (soon). This book was a total waste of my money and my time to read it. The focus on Windows programming and reference to CM ver 3.1 shows how old it is.
Most of the information I already knew (from the Cisco site and SDK doco) however the nitty gritty information I was looking for was absent.
I also think it is poorly written; far from the technical excellence I have experienced in other CiscoPress books.
If I had known this, I wouldn't have bothered buying the book. Extremely disappointed.
I have tended to buy books with the CiscoPress logo without question. After this experience, I won't be doing that in future.

This books is a must have for anyone developing services for Cisco phones.

This book isn't about http, ASP, or IIS but gets right to the heart of the matter which is properly using XML as the wrapper for presenting data on Cisco phones. The authors assume you know the language you'll be developing in as well as your server platform and spend practically no time at all discussing them. If you're a web developer already you'll probably be writing services before Chapter 5(p100). If you dont have a clear understanding already of XML, http, a scripting language for your server platform best to bone up on that first.

Although examples are IIS and ASP I was able to use it to write all of my apps in Python for Apache/IIS.

The examples are clear, concise, and the book is a good starting point to build from.