Customer Reviews

VoIP Telephony with Asterisk

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

 

 

Reading some of the positive reviews about this book, it's hard to believe it's the same one I bought.

I have 15+ years experience in the IT field. Whenever I install a new technology, I like to go find the best book I can on the subject and just start reading. Paul Mahler's book is the only one I could find on Asterisk so it's the one I chose, :-) Reading it straight through wasn't too bad: there's a lot of information in there. That's why it gets 2 stars.

Here's why it doesn't get more than 2.

It's very disorganized. Some sections appear to just be dropped in at the end of unrelated chapters. Advanced coverage of some topics occurs early in the book, then later he goes back and covers some of the basics. You're left bewildered early on, then later it's "Oh! Well why didn't he tell me that FIRST??"

The index, while it appears good at a glance, leaves much to be desired. Want to read about the Playback command? The index tells you to go to page 100, where you will find a one line example of the syntax. No explanation of the command, no description. Fortunately, more info is available elsewhere in the book but good luck finding it in the index.

I was reading one section and I knew I'd read it before. I googled for it and, sure enough, found it verbatim in the wikipedia. Large portions of this book appear to have been copied verbatim from the wiki at voip-info.org. Perhaps he wrote a lot of that site as well, I don't know, but it does explain some of the disorganization. It's like he found a good tidbit on the wiki, cut it and pasted it in at the end of whatever chapter was convenient.

And the typos. Not a biggie, but sometimes it can be confusing when there are glaring typos in technical data. And, in this book, there are a number of them.

All in all, I really wish there was an alternative out there. But there isn't and if you're like me and you've got to have the manual handy for the new technology you're supporting, maybe you should buy Mahler's book. Frankly, you can find information quicker through google and the wiki. But if you have the time and want to read it straight through it can be helpful.

This book is a good attempt to hit the moving target that is Asterisk. I keep coming back to it and finding things to try and use. There is a lot of really good content and the Author does a good job of citing his sources too.
This book could do more for introducing the beginner to Asterisk - the concept of extensions in the dial plan is key to understanding Asterisk and it is a strange paradigm until you understand it. I wish this book had introduced it a little better.
Additionally, more dial plan and configuration file examples would have been a very helpful resource.
This book has been invaluable to me starting out with Asterisk. I would welcome updates and revisions as Asterisk expands.

This is the book that you need to get started with do-it-yourself VOIP using the open-source Asterisk PBX software. Mahler's book will help you learn VOIP basics and serve as a convenienct reference for setting up and maintaining Asterisk systems. Highly recommended.

This is a book where you can see niether the author or the publisher paid much attention to detail, there are a lot of errors.

It does help on understanding a little about Asterisk if you are an absolute beginner, but if you managed to install an Asterisk server based on the information already avaliable in the wikipedia at voip-info.org then you dont need this book.

The good thing: this is the first effort to document Asterisk for the public, there is no other good book to compare it at this moment, I hope the second edition corrects all the errors.

Written for the newcomer to voice-over-Internet protocol, this beginner's guide to Asterisk software supplies step-by-step procedures for installation, configuration, and maintenance of
the first release of the Asterisk telephone system, which turns an ordinary inexpensive PC running Linux into a powerful enterprise telephone system. It explains how Asterisk can replace
many legacy telephone systems; this software, being open and quickly evolving, allows tuning as needed. The book, while not presented as a complete guide to all the features and
functionality of Asterisk, does show how to attain a reliable, sophisticated, full-featured-and free-enterprise telephone system of any size. One applauds the author's having three VoIP
experts separately review the book before its publication. The reader of VoIP Telephony with Asterisk can feel lucky to have such on-target guidance. The author can add this helpful
book to his many previous respected publications about computing and information technology.

VoIP Telephony with Asterisk is apparently aimed at newcomers to Asterisk who value their time and want to avoid weeks of wading through the mass of disorganized material available on the web. It provides a grounding in telephony concepts that were new to me, coming as I did at Asterisk from the Linux world, and enough information on PBX configuration so that I was able to assemble a two line, three extension system of my own with goodies like
voicemail in a couple of days.

No one book can cover the entirety of Asterisk, and I don't think three books would be enough. Cisco needs a lot more than that for its less functional PBX offering. I'd have like more examples in this one, but it was well worth the price.

Telephony is the technology of placing calls over your data network instead of the public switched telephone system; and Asterisk is the very popular open-source PBX software for Linux. The book provides a useful introduction to both of them. Curiously, Asterisk is not included with the book. I was disappointed to have to download the code for myself since it costs very little to bind a CD into a book. But I note that the publisher offers it separately along with an installation program that they claim takes the work out of loading and compiling. If so,that's a good thing because my first installation took most of the day. Otherwise, the author has done a thorough job of covering the concepts and the details of how to bring up an Asterisk PBX and all of the examples work. Thatis no small achievement in a book on a new technnology.

After reading the book and reading the reviews here I would firstly like to comment on the bad reviews given. Question to you guys:
-Does someone with a science degree need to read a step-by-step book on how to mix baking soda and vinegar together jsut to see what happens?
-Did you really think that the author would put the hundreds and hundreds of pages from the RFC's in the book?? HA!

I'm VERY glad that the book was writin by a VoIP specialist and was verified by VOIP specialists and not an English Professor (i'm excusing the mistakes :P)

This book is a "Introduction" to VoIP with Asterisk. Not a VoIP bible!!! When you are dealing with Open-Source you are usually forced to scatter all over the net to find even basic documentation on what your working on.

This book put Asterisk and all of its respective services into a simple, clear and informative reference. It helps you get an Asterisk box up and running with all its whistles and bells up in just a few days, and you actually understand whats going on!! It also gives you great ideas on how to market it as well ;).

Want to get into Open Source VoIP? Get this book!

...for 50 bucks you CANT go wrong!

This book contains little that is not already on the Asterisk Wiki and that which it does contain is poorly edited (many, many typos), badly spelled and expressed in sometimes eccentric grammar. Here's one example (page 175): "....try recording 8 Khz, 16 bit wav files which will are likely to work better than 8 bit files". Apart from two misprints in kHz (k for kilo is lower-case, Hertz is the name of a scientist and units named after people are capitalised), what happened to the proof-reading of the rest of the sentence? This is one of very many such examples.

A good book on this subject is sorely needed but this is not it.

The descriptions of SIP, H323, etc give the (surely unfounded) feeling that the author has skimmed the RFCs, gained a superficial knowledge and dumped some keywords into the book. Large portions of the book are simply listings of the various configuration files which are better described on the Asterisk Wiki.

I've been working with Asterisk for six months and the documentation on the Internet is either scant or too technical. Thankfully this book fills in a lot of gaps and provides a better overall picture to me. I recommend this book and thank the author for helping me get my work done.