Config advice for asterisk? [telecom]

Speaking of asterisk, can someone suggest a good source of configuration advice for asterisk?

I currently have a SIP phone on my home LAN that is set up with external providers for inbound and outbound calling but it's just a phone, no voice mail, no three-way calling, no baffling voice jail menus. So I also have an old laptop that's running FreeBSD, and I've installed asterisk from the ports collection, currently version 1.8.8. Now what?

I'd like to start with ordinary stuff like voice mail and three-way calling, eventually do fancier stuff like announcements to tell me which of my three VoIP numbers an incoming call is arriving on. (It's in the SIP header which my phone isn't smart enough to display on its own.) I've looked at the O'Reilly asterisk book which is full of advice for stuff I don't care about like interfacing to external phone lines, and doesn't seem to correspond very well any anything I actually want to do.

Any suggestions where to find simple canned configs and related advice? I'm a reasonably competent programmer, so something that explained the programming model as well as giving examples would be nice.

Regards, John Levine, snipped-for-privacy@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.

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[Moderator snip]

I've been out of the business for 4 years now and am technically retired, but I used to set up [among other things] asterisk VoIP systems with interfaces to PRIs for small businesses which features probably the world's best voice mail system and support for Cisco 7960 VoIP instruments, Polycom IP4000 conference room phones, ATA analog adapters, etc.

Googling "asterisk configuration examples" returns some very useful material, such as (among many others):

:-)

FYI, there are 3 versions of the O'Reilly asterisk book so far:

Asterisk, the future of telephony, 1st ed, 376 pages, September 2005 ISBN unknown -- my only copy is PDF

Asterisk, the future of telephony, 2nd ed, 604 pages, August 2007 Asterisk 1.4, ISBN-10: 0-596-51048-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-596-51048-0,

Asterisk, the definitive guide, 3rd ed, 734 pages, April 2011 Asterisk 1.8, ISBN: 978-0-596-51734-2

Also O'Reilly Asterisk Cookbook, 1st ed, 66 pages, April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-449-30382-2

And these two tomes:

Asterisk Hacking [Ben Jackson] (Elsevier) 2007,253 pages ISBN 978-1-59749-151-8 comes with a CD (which I can't quickly find)

Asterisk for Dummies (Stephen Olejniczak (author of Telecom for Dummies)) (Wiley) 2007, ISBN 978-0-470-09854-7, 334 pages