Free eBook "Asterisk: The Future of Telephony"

Asterisk Documentation Project - Project Information

"We're pleased to announce the availability of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony online! The result of hundreds of hours of painstaking labor, this book represents the work of Jim Van Meggelen, Jared Smith, and Leif Madsen over the past year.

Thanks to O'Reilly Media for publishing the book and agreeing to publish it under the Creative Commons license. ..."

Very cool... Downloaded.

It's copyrighted August 30, 2005 and weighs in at 376 pages...

Here's the table of contents...

"Chapter 1, A Telephony Revolution
This is where we chop up the kindling, and light the fire. Asterisk is going to change the world of telecom, and this is where we discuss our reasons for that belief.

Chapter 2, Preparing a System for Asterisk
Covers some of the engineering considerations you should have in mind when designing a telecommunications system. Much of this material can be skipped if you want to get right to installing, but these are important concepts to understand, should you ever plan on putting an Asterisk system into production.

Chapter 3, Installing Asterisk
Covers the obtaining, compiling and installation of Asterisk.

Chapter 4, Initial Configuration of Asterisk
Describes the initial configuration of Asterisk. Here we will cover the important configuration files that must exist to define the channels and features available to your system.

Chapter 5, Dialplan Basics
Introduces the heart of Asterisk, the dialplan.

Chapter 6, More Dialplan Concepts
Goes over some more advanced dialplan concepts.

Chapter 7, Understanding Telephony
Taking a break from Asterisk, this chapter discusses some of the more important technologies in use in the Public Telephone Network.

Chapter 8, Protocols for VoIP
Following the discussion of legacy telephony, this chapter discusses Voice over IP.

Chapter 9, The Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI)
Introduces one of the more amazing components, the Asterisk Gateway Interface. Using Perl, PHP, and Python, we demonstrate how external programs can be used to add nearly limitless functionality to your PBX.

Chapter 10, Asterisk for the Über-Geek
Briefly covers what is, in fact, a rich and varied cornucopia of incredible features and functions; all part of the Asterisk phenomenon.

Chapter 11, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony
Predicts a future where open source telephony completely transforms an industry desperately in need of a revolution."

(via digg - O'Reilly Asterisk Book Available For Free Download)

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