It's easy to get started with Asterisk Essentials! All you'll need to begin is a flash-enabled browser and speakers or headphones. You can learn a lot just by watching and listening to the videos, but we think you'll get the most from the class if you try out the examples yourself. We recommend that before you start, you get access to a Linux system where you can run Asterisk. You'll eventually want to connect a softphone to Asterisk, so it would be ideal if your system were on the same network as your Asterisk system. But don't worry if you can't manage that - we give some guidance for firewall configuration in the course. And even if you can't connect for all the examples, you'll still learn the basic concepts by following along with our examples.

In the Asterisk Essentials course, we cover a lot of information very rapidly. We don't recommend that you try to go through the whole course in just a single session. You're likely to learn the most if you watch 1-2 chapters at a time, over a period of about two weeks. Of course, you're able to watch each chapter more than once, so don't hesitate to review content that is confusing or that lays the foundation for more advanced topics. You may also find it beneficial to review earlier chapters once you have finished later chapters and have a better understanding of the concepts covered.

Digium, Inc

Digium Inc., the Asterisk® Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. Since its founding in 1999, Digium has become the open source alternative to proprietary communication providers, with offerings that cost as much as 80 percent less. Digium offers Asterisk software free to the open source community and offers Asterisk Business Edition and Switchvox IP PBX software to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. The company's product line includes a wide range of hardware and software to enable resellers and customers to implement turnkey VoIP systems or to design their own custom telephony solutions. Used in combination with Digium's telephony interface cards, Asterisk offers a strategic, highly cost-effective approach to voice and data transport over IP, TDM, switched and Ethernet architectures. Digium's offerings include VoIP, conferencing, voicemail, legacy PBX, IVR, auto attendant, media servers and gateways, and application servers and gateways.