Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I'm a working developer that recently became engaged in a J2EE project where needed to design and build a SIP server for a call center requiring all manner of specialized behaviors. Needless to say I needed to learn all about the ins and outs of SIP as this system would be SIP VoIP based.
I started out trying to use the various RFCs related to the SIP and SDP protocols. Well, I could spend an entire review about how miserable it is to trudge through typical RFC documentation. Online hyperlinked documentation is indeed in some respects a miracle of our modern cyber information age. Yet it's not exactly perfect. In many respects I maintain that the traditional book remains solidly the highest technological invention that mankind has yet conceived - especially now that I can compare book form information vs. its online hyperlinked and searchable alternative.
When it comes to learning and having ready access to the relevant information I'd take a book, such as "SIP: Understanding the Session Initiation Protocol" hands down vs the RFCs. I was making slow and painful progress yet once I had this book in hand, I could quickly whip around in it and cross reference the material presented in it by flipping pages, look for things via by scanning the table of contents, or dereferencing the index. Finally I started to rapidly accelerate my endeavor.
Besides the mechanics of accessing the relevant information, this book was also solidly presented by the author. He indeed has a authoritative command of the subject matter. Many of the scenarios he presents of how SIP is deployed and used were directly relevant to my particular project. It was particularly important to see the full dialog of SIP/SDP protocol exchange and the diagrams that accompanied this were very helpful. Nice visual diagrams of this manner are not to be found in the bland RFC material.
I came to amazon.com and read up on all the reviews posted for this title. Several of them gave the book a low rating. I sensed that what these people were after was a more digestible higher level presentation of the subject matter. There is an O'Reilly title on VoIP that I think might serve some of these folks better in that regard. However, this book on SIP also does a fair job of presenting SIP in light of some of the other VoIP related standards, etc. It's just that the main thrust of this book is to convey the technical understanding of SIP so that one can program systems based on it.
So if one is a software developer and needs to learn the technical ins and outs of SIP then this books is definitely the one to get. It beats using the RFCs by themselves by many leagues.
Click Here to see more reviews about: SIP: Understanding the Session Initiation Protocol, Second Edition
This revised edition of "SIP: Understanding the Session Initiation Protocol" gives you a thorough and up-to-date understanding of this revolutionary protocol for call signalling and IP telephony. The second edition includes brand new discussions on the use of SIP for wireless multimedia communications. It explains how SIP is powerful "rendezvous" protocol that leverages mobility and presence to allow users to communicate using different devices, modes and services anywhere they are connected to the Internet. You learn why SIP has been chosen by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Program for wireless cell phones) as the core signalling, presence and instant messaging protocol.
