The authors

Jim Van Meggelen is President and CTO of Core Telecom Innovations, a Canadian-based provider of open-source telephony solutions. He has over fifteen years of enterprise telecom experience, for such companies as Nortel, Williams and Telus, and has extensive knowledge of both legacy and VoIP equipment from manufacturers such as Nortel, Cisco and Avaya.
Jim Van Meggelen is one of the principal contributors to the Asterisk Documentation Project, and is co-authoring the book Asterisk: The Future of Telephony .

Jared Smith is a long time member of the Asterisk community, and a co-founder of the Asterisk Documentation Project. Jared has over a decade of systems administration and programming experience, along with several years of professional telephony and voice-over-IP experience. As the architect of one of the world's largest Asterisk installations, he has a wealth of hands-on Asterisk knowledge.

Leif Madsen first took an interest in Asterisk while attempting to find a voice conferencing solution for himself and his friends. After someone suggested trying Asterisk, the obsession began. Wanting to contribute and be involved with the community, and noticing the lack of Asterisk documentation, he co-founded the Asterisk Documentation Project.

The book

If you are keen on Asterisk and you want to examine in details this powerful open-source system, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony is the book for you.

The authors tried to give you information about almost everything you could do on the system. The book starts with the telephony revolutiona and finishes with some ideas about the future of the telephony and Asterisk.

It will guide you through the whole process, showing you how to prepare your system, how to install and configure your Asterisk, but sometimes the amount of extra information could be very confusable.

The lack of examples is balanced by the very comprehensive Appendixes at the end of the book. The complete references about the dial plan applications, configuration files and CLI commands are extremely useful. A big plus is that the book refers to the latest version of the Asterisk, which now is 1.2.

Conclusion

I would like to say that, although the book could be of use to the beginners, the advanced users are those who can take a maximum advantage of this book. They can expand their knowledge and learn more details about the Asterisk.

Download

This book is released under a creative commons license, download the complete book [here] - 4,5MB