Well, I have to admit that Packt hadn’t approached me for writing an updated book, specifically due to the fact that they have other books about FreePBX. If you want to learn about other stuff that you can do with Asterisk, you can get my second book about Asterisk AGI programming – that will surely give you some ideas and tracks of implementation for new ideas.

I think that writing a “Tips and Tricks” book for FreePBX is a good idea, however, I have no idea how to even start it – as there are so many. How can you choose 20 or 30 topics for a book, when you have over 10,000 to choose from.

Regards,
Nir Simionovich

I read the FreePBX book http://www.it-slav.net/blogs/2009/11/26/book-review-freepbx-2-5-powerful-telephony-solutions/ and used that on my AsteriskNow installation.
The FreePBX book do also cover the theory behind telephony, more or less every book about Asterisk cover that area. What I wanted was some tricks&tips for my AsteriskNOW installation and the AsteriskNOW book did not help me.

For example: An mp3 player is missing and do not exist in the yum repositories that comes with AsteriskNOW so I installed it manually to get MusicOnHold to work. I was hoping that your book should help me with issues like that.

Is there any plan to write an updated version of your book? I would gladly read it.

Best Regards
Peter Andersson

I admit that the book is outdated – it was published in March 2008, almost 7 months prior to the release of AsteriskNOW 1.5 which replaced the AsteriskGUI with FreePBX.

At the time of writing the book, Digium was focused on promoting the AsteriskGUI interface, thus, there was no indication that the interface would change.

There is a vast number of websites and manuals available on the Net for FreePBX, so I’m confident you’ll be able to setup AsteriskNOW at ease – even without reading an outdated book. While the GUI parts of the book are outdated, the rest of the book – dealing mainly with theoretical and general telephony isn’t outdated – and will surely give a newbie the information required to start swimming the Asterisk/Telephony world.

Regards,
Nir Simionovich