Product Description

Learn how to set up and use TrixBox (formally known as Asterisk@Home) as a traditional and Internet telephone system. The book is written in an easy to follow walk-through style, building up concepts step by step, before guiding you carefully through the planning, deployment, and management of your telephone system. Because the book covers the concepts and practices of both telephony and Asterisk, it is suitable for both professional and home users with no prior telecom experience. It's ideal for any user wishing to set up a telephony system for individual or small business usage. No previous knowledge of Trixbox or networking is required, although some basic knowledge of PBX and Linux would be an advantage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #474744 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

About the Author
Kerry Garrison has been in the IT industry for over 20 years with positions ranging from IT Director of a large multi-site distribution company to developing a large hosted web server platform for a major ISP, to finally running his own IT consulting business in Southern California. Kerry was introduced to the world of Asterisk by a friend and began running his own business on it. After about a year of working with it and writing some articles that became extremely popular on the net, he felt it was time to start putting clients onto Asterisk-based systems. Today, Asterisk PBX systems represent a significant portion of his business revenue. Kerry has spoken at Astricon and does a regular seminar series in California. He is also the publisher of both http://www.voipspeak.net and http://www.asterisktutorials.com. He is very active with the Asterisk and FreePBX community and has even contributed modules to the FreePBX project.

Customer Reviews

Not really enlightened
I was a bit disappointed by this book. For one thing, it is out of date with respect to current TrixBox releases, but that is to be expected I suppose. The real reason I am disappointed is that it doesn't really tell me anything that I can't discover just by clicking around the menus. The first 70 pages, almost half the book, cover installation (which frankly involves just putting in the CD and following the prompts) and then a bunch of screen shots of the various configuration tools.

One of the main reasons I bought the book was to learn about the cryptic syntax in the many configuration files. Plenty of times the book says to "add the following text to the configuration" and will quote some cryptic strings like this one:

exten => *52,2,Hangup()

With no explanation of what that does. I would have thought that a chapter could be devoted to this configuration file syntax.

In summary, the book does contain useful information - and if you are reading it prior to using TrixBox and Asterisk then it does give a good overview of the system and recommend some good strategies for planning your deployment. However, on a technical level, I felt that the book was too superficial and contained too many screen shots of stuff that is just obvious by looking at the screen. The lack of depth meant that for me, it didnt live up to its title.