[Asterisk-Users] simple over view of the process

[Wilson Pickett]

You have already had several good answers but none included these
intro articles by John Todd which IMO are an excellent intro to the
whole thing:

Starting from zero:
 http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/07/03/asterisk.html

The second article adds a bit of hardware to interface with PSTN
 http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/01/22/asterisk2.html

The excellent effort http://asteriskdocs.org (I think I contributed
about 6 lines here) contains some interesting, easy to assimilate
concepts by showing how a movie theater might make an IVR menu, for
example.

Every day, 10 people come to IRC and ask questions that show they
haven't the foggiest idea what a dialplan, a context or an extension
priority is. Reading just the above three docs will give you that and
a lot more.