Page 18 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Organization

The book is organized into these chapters:
Chapter 1, A Telephony Revolution
This is where we chop up the kindling and light the fire. Asterisk is going to change
the world of telecom, and this is where we discuss our reasons for that belief.
Chapter 2, Preparing a System for Asterisk
Covers some of the engineering considerations you should have in mind when
designing a telecommunications system. Much of this material can be skipped if
you want to get right to installing, but these are important concepts to understand,
should you ever plan on putting an Asterisk system into production.
Chapter 3, Installing Asterisk
Covers the obtaining, compiling, and installation of Asterisk.
Chapter 4, Initial Configuration of Asterisk
Describes the initial configuration of Asterisk. Here we will cover the important
configuration files that must exist to define the channels and features available to
your system.
Chapter 5, Dialplan Basics
Introduces the heart of Asterisk, the dialplan.
Chapter 6, More Dialplan Concepts
Goes over some more advanced dialplan concepts.
Chapter 7, Understanding Telephony
Taking a break from Asterisk, this chapter discusses some of the more important
technologies in use in the Public Telephone Network.
Chapter 8, Protocols for VoIP
Following the discussion of legacy telephony, this chapter discusses Voice over
Internet Protocol.
Chapter 9, The Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI)
Introduces one of the more amazing components, the Asterisk Gateway Interface.
Using Perl, PHP, and Python, we demonstrate how external programs can be used
to add nearly limitless functionality to your PBX.
Chapter 10, Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) and Adhearsion
Describes how external applications can connect to Asterisk to manipulate or
monitor various aspects of the system. Also included in this chapter is a gentle
introduction to the Adhearsion framework.
Chapter 11, The Asterisk GUI Framework
The Asterisk GUI Framework, new in Asterisk 1.4, is a framework system that
allows web developers to create graphical interfaces with minimal interference to
the standard configuration files.

xvi | Preface