Customer Reviews

Practical Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6: From Beginner to Expert

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

 

 

I am fairly new to asterisk and have tried to find my way around the asterisk product with web searches and howto's.

This book is like a real user manual. The concepts are well defined and easy to understand it reads very easily and covers a lot of topics. I have not completed this book yet but after 3 chapters It is already worth it.
I got many of the "now I get it" moments while reading so far. I was doing some changes in asterisks not always knowing exactly what they did mean or how they fit in the broader picture.

The examples are very clear and cover the very basic asterisk without a front-end like freepbx, ... even if you never plan to work with the base packaged it is helpful by explaining the underlying architecture.

I received this book a week ago and have slowly been going through it but have not made it all of the way so I cannot give a full review of the book but to this point I am impressed. I am fairly new to the world of Asterisk only using it for the last year or so and I was looking for a book that could easily explains some of Asterisks functions along with giving clear examples. This book does both.

I feel like the authors really went all out in trying to make you feel like they wrote the book for people. Not just throwing all of their information in to one place and letting you sort it out. The chapters and well placed and when I am in the need of finding something quickly the index fully lists where everything can be found at with ease.

Out of my IT books that I've accumulated over the many years this book is in my top 10 right now and would recommend this book to anyone just beginning with Asterisk or someone needing a desktop reference guide.

I purchased this book when I became responsible for the Asterisk PBX at my last job. It was the most current book I could find on the subject and did a great job of introducing a great variety of subjects within the realm of Asterisk. The examples were thorough and relative to tasks many Asterisk administrators face.

I would have liked to seen better coverage of hardware, specifically FXO, FXS, T1/PRI and DAHDI drivers. The information presented was not sufficient to get past some of the hurdles that I encountered in getting my Digium hardware to work. The best source I found for that was Digium's Advanced Asterisk class.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who doesn't want to wade through all the outdated information that's available on the web. The information is out there, but it takes some time to separate the relevant from the rest. The information that was presented was clear in which versions it applied to and differences between versions was documented as well. All dialplan applications were documented for a handy reference in case you are not in front of a console as well.

Practical Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6 from Beginning to Expert offers a fine guide to networking and telephony operations for Asterisk, a program notorious for its poor internal documentation. This volume is thus a 'must' for any Asterisk user, going beyond 'supporting documentation' to BE the documentation key to getting Asterisk to work well. From configuring the initial system to using its powerful features, Asterisk programmers will find this a 'must'.

This is a well written book for beginners.



Pros:
Simple to follow
Author prepared the book in such a way that it builds the foundation first.
Learn by practice approach [means , while reading you build the system]

Cons:
Does not cover Asterisk installation[but voip-info org has step by step instructions]

I HIGHLY recommend this book

Make sure
you have a spare system to tryout.[I made my laptop dual boot with centos]
Another system w/some soft phone installed [I tried to use the same system and ran into some audio issue]

This book is really great to get started with Asterisk. It provided enough context for me to look for more resources. The AMI reference section is pretty weak, since it does not document the AMI command arguments, which turns out to be a tricky thing to find. The books value would increase a lot, if they were included.

Written by a high professional. Author explains every concept with simple and clear example.
While reading, you find tricks and tips from author that allows you to get more than just information from this book, but a knowledge of using Asterisk.
As to me, it should be read right after "Asterisk: The Definitive Guide (Definitive Guides)" ([...]) because it's more practical book and requires some understanding, experience with Asterisk.
I reccomend this book for those, who took Asterisk seriously.

We read a lot of the stuff available on the Internet and purchased other books, but we were looking for a how to manual, and this is it. (we are application folks that are reasonably technical, but not technical folks) We were able to install an asterisk server by following the first 4-5 chapters. We did every setup and had it working almost immediately. We followed Appendix A to set up the server and started with 1.4. Keep in mind the latest 1.4 will be different than the commands on page 254, (for us instead of asterisk-1.4.24 is was asterisk-1.4.36). Also we got an error on ./configure, with C++ processor "lib/cpp" fails, so had to do sudo apt-get -y install gcc -build -essential. also aptitude -y install libcurl4-openssl-dev did not exist so we skipped that it was ok. FYI we were running on ubuntu 10.4 LTS. We were looking for a follow the bouncing ball and got it.

Very easy to read, follow and understand. It does nt overload ou with information, and if you go through the book doing the examples, you will find that you will learn aserisk really easily.

I hope that someone posts rejoinder explaining why everything I am about to say is incorrect. It will mean I have not wasted my money and time on this book.

I am attempting to run Asterisk 1.6 on an openbsd box. I installed Asterisk with no problem and brought up the command line as per the instructions. Those were the last instructions that worked! Even the extremely simple 'hello world' case fails because the verbatim command produces and 'unknown command' error. I looked through the list of available commands and many of the ones mentioned in the book were not listed in the software. My guess is that this book is for 1.4 and 1.6 is completely different (kind of like how PF recently gave everyone a few hours of busy work).

As I said, if I have misjudged the book someone should point out how. I will gladly give it more stars if it is actually useful in 1.6 like it says on the cover.