Asterisk, a quick guide. Part Five.

Resources.

Should you feel so inclined here are a list of resources to get you up and running.

The following books may be helpfull:

"Asterisk The Future of Telephony" by Jim Van Maggglen, Jared Smith and Leif Madsen, is a pretty good read.

Available from Amazon or if you want it for free download it from here

It's available for free because of the creative commons license. It's all legit !

Sadly, it's not the only book / tutorial you need!

They all have something in common, they all differ, you need to take bits from each book, to get a fully working system.

"Building Telephony Systems with Asterisk" by David Gomillion and Barrie Dempster, is a small book, 160 pages in total.

However it's a good quick guide that fills in some of the gaps missing from the first book.

"Switching to VoIP", by Ted Wallingford is another book that you will use to fill in missing gaps!

To be fair there is so much in Asterisk it would be a mammoth task to cover everything in the detail it requires.

The Asterisk documentation Project is a very good resource for getting started, Volume One can be found here

Of course we need the software to run Asterisk, I suggest using Fedora Core 1 as the best starting point.

Finding where to download Core 1 is a little tricky! Go to the Fedora home page found here

Click on the Download tab, and under "Slow downloading", you will see a link to "Fedora mirror sites", click on that.

Select a link close to you, under the Parent Directory you will see a listing of the versions available, we are looking for 1.

Select the i386 folder, then the ISO folder, then download "yarrow-i386-disc1.iso to disc3.iso".

Installation of Linux is getting easier all the time, and Fedora Core is pretty easy.

All you need now is Asterisk! Get it here

Download it to /usr/src , unpack and install it and your all set for hours of endless fun :-)

Book learning is good !

You can learn fun stuff reading books, and when done their great for starting fires :-)