On Wednesday 12 July 2006 11:53, Jim Van Meggelen wrote: > On July 12, 2006, Ira wrote: > > At 07:47 AM 7/12/2006, you wrote: > > > > >Asterisk The Future Of Telephony is perfect step by step > > > > > novice users guide: > > > > >http://www.asteriskdocs.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=11 > > > > > > > > I'd tend to suggest it's far from perfect, but having a > > > > book to hold when starting out is a good thing. > > > > > >So how would you improve it? > > We discussed writing an authoritative bible of all things Asterisk, > and realized that that would be a mighty tome indeed. Also, what we > found was most needed was an introduction. Enough to get started. > From that base (as you have discovered) there was enough information > in the community to go to the next step.
I think the biggest criticism that I can level is that it was very clear from the writing that chapters were written at different times in the development process, so while one chapter was a good description about how things worked in 1.0, a different chapter would have new and interesting things in 1.2. The book reads as if you finished each chapter as a work unto itself, and when each was done, you never went back to revise it. Hence, the book has a feel of a collection of articles about Asterisk, rather than a unified work. > We are working on more with O'Reilly, and there is other stuff in the > works as well. One of the challenges of writing for Asterisk is that > it changes so fast it is hard to keep up with it. It was tough enough > writing our book to handle Asterisk 1.2, since many of the features > of 1.2 did not exist when we started writing. I appreciate the difficulty of writing such a book; however, I think it lacked a final review by an editor with an eye for unifying the material. That's the most substantive criticism that I have of the book. However, whatever its flaws, it is still superior to have a book that I can feel comfortable pointing others towards than not having one. -- Tilghman _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-doc mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-doc
