[asterisk-doc] Asterisk: The Definitive Guide -- Call For Reviewers

[Leif Madsen]

Hey all!

We're getting VERY close to having the first draft of the next Asterisk book, 
Asterisk: The Definitive Guide ready to be sent off to production. We're very 
close to meeting our target dates, but our review timeline is very tight. Only 
about 2 weeks!

Each morning we're continuing to work on the book, taking in your comments, 
reviewing chapters, testing dialplan and installation steps, and all that good 
stuff.

However, we've been looking at this book since May 2010 and our eyes are 
starting to get glazed :) We'd love for the community to have a look at the book 
and offer some constructive criticism.

It's far too late to take requests for things to cover. What we have is what 
we're going to get in for this edition. After we finish this book though we plan 
on continuing to update it, so there will be a chance to take suggestions again 
soon.

For now, head on over to http://ofps.oreilly.com and check out the book (updated 
this morning). There are a couple of bugs in the OFPS software which are causing 
comments to not be available after chapter 8, but we're hoping to have those 
resolved by Friday. However, we do have this fancy mailing list that we can use.

Russell, Jim and myself will be monitoring this list for comments, and we'll try 
and get all of them satisfied before publication. If there is a particular area 
we're covering that you're an expert in, we'd love to have you focus on that 
chapter. You can email me back directly for more information on what we might be 
looking for in that type of situation.

We do have editors to help with grammar and spelling, but pointing anything out 
is certainly useful. The best use of your time though is testing the dialplan 
snippets, the installation instructions for both Ubuntu and CentOS (we're 
covering two Linux distributions this time around, which increases the testing 
load significantly), and making sure anything we're explaining is concise, 
relates to what we're talking about, and makes sense. The goal is to build an 
Asterisk system from scratch, so following through our dialplan via the chapters 
to make sure it all continues to build on itself would be ideal.

Additionally, if you see any sections which say, "see chapter XXX for more 
information" that are not links, please let us know, as those are meant to be 
placeholders until the chapters existed and we could link back to them. Now that 
all chapters are created, we should be linking to the appropriate locations. If 
you're reading a section and notice a good spot to reference another part of the 
book (for example, lets say we're talking about database functionality in one of 
the other chapters, and there is an appropriate spot in the Database Integration 
chapter to link to), then let us know!

Thanks for your interest! Books should be shipping sometime between March and 
April. Pre-orders are available now at http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517342. 
And yes, we'll be releasing under a Creative Commons license like the last two 
books, so you'll have access to the book at any time online.

This book has been pretty much written from the ground up, and is well over 600 
pages of content. It's been a lot of work, but we hope you like it!

Thanks!
Russell, Jim and Leif.