Practical Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6: From Beginner to Expert

1. How to Get the Most Out of This Book

First, thank you for buying this book. It’s only through the interest of readers like you that a project such as this is possible.

We wrote this book because Asterisk doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Many of the resources recommended by the Asterisk community are in the form of wikis and websites, which are inconsistently updated and often contain incorrect information. We want this book to serve as that missing manual for Asterisk. In other words, we sought to create the kind of book we were looking for: a readable text that can be read in chapter order or used as a handbook.

1.1 What Is Asterisk?

Asterisk is a telephone system, but different. It’s not hardware. It’s software that you can download ...