Books Available Amazon.com related to asterisk programming

So you want to learn more about asterisk PBX programming and are thinking about getting a book to help you. I have researched this and as of this posting, there are currently 2 books available on the subject. I went ahead and bought them both.

The first is a bright yellow book titled "VOIP Telephony with Asterisk. A technical overview of the open source PBX" written by Paul Mahler.

The second is a white book with a starfish on the cover titled "Asterisk the future of telephony" written by Jim Van Meggelen, Jared Smith & Leif Madsen

First let me tell you about the yellow book by Paul Mahler. In my opinion, this guy is basically throwing together a book with little understanding of asterisk or how to actually use it. He is basically copy and pasting together several different manuals into chapters and calling it a book. The book does a good job of describing the very basic functions of asterisk and goes over a few of the concepts but that’s about it. Don't get this book if you want to do anything more complex then get 3 phones calling each other. Also I would say that before I got this book I had spent considerable time online doing research and was getting frustrated with certain topics being too complex. This book had not gotten past what I learned the first day reading online.

Secondly we have the second book with the starfish, Asterisk the future of telephony. Let me say that I have not even finished this book yet and have already gotten more in-depth information on asterisk in the first few chapters then the other book gave me. If you had to make a choice, definitely get this book. The 10th chapter labeled, asterisk for the uber geek explains how to set you phone system up to access a database, read your email to you while your on the road. How to set up asterisk to record calls, how to make your phone system dial out from the command line and scripting. The first thing I thought of was creating a script to generate a call list to call out like a telemarketing system. I hope this helps you in your asterisk book buying decision.