Sebastopol, CA--The telephony revolution is underway--a transformation fueled by an open source PBX called Asterisk.
"Asterisk lovingly embraces the concept of standards compliance, while also enjoying the freedom to develop its own innovation. What you choose to implement is up to you--Asterisk imposes no limitations," explain the expert authors of the new edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony (Jim Van Meggelen, Leif Madsen, and Jared Smith, O'Reilly, $44.99).
Updated and expanded for the 1.4 release of the software, this major revision shows readers how they can save money and stay in control of their telephone systems. The new edition also includes greatly expanded coverage of SIP, databases, and up-to-the-minute information on management and administration.
Indeed, using Asterisk, developers can tinker with their phone calls just like mechanics tinker with their cars. They can add features, increase performance, add redundancy, and increase collaboration. With Asterisk, users are no longer dependent on expensive and inflexible systems that are tuned to the vendor's needs, rather than the end user's.
Yet Asterisk's flexibility comes at a price, however: it's not a simple system to learn and configuring can seem tricky. Fortunately, this new book offers a detailed roadmap--guiding every user through the process of writing a dialplan, integrating phone systems with a relational database, scripting Asterisk with the manager interface and AGI, using Ruby on Rails with Adhearsion, and much more.
Indeed, this timely new book covers everything users need to design a simple but complete system with little or no Asterisk experience, and no more than rudimentary telecommunications knowledge.
The new edition includes:
- A new chapter on managing and administering an Asterisk system
- A new chapter on using Asterisk with databases
- Coverage of features in Asterisk 1.4
- A new appendix on dialplan functions
- A simplified installation chapter
- New simplified SIP configuration, including examples for several popular SIP clients (soft phones and IP telephones)
- Revised chapters and appendices reviewed and updated for the latest in features, applications, trends, and best practices
The future of telephony is here--and with Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, readers can embrace it, too.
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 has extensive knowledge of both legacy and VoIP equipment from manufacturers such as Nortel, Cisco and Avaya.
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 him 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.
More information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and samplesAsterisk: The Future of Telephony, Second Edition
Jim Van Meggelen, Jared Smith, Leif Madsen
ISBN: 0-596-51048-9, $44.99 USD
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