Need advice on building asterisk telephony system on centos

Dear Asterisk Team,

I’m following the “The Future of Telephony” book downloaded from Asterisk website and aiming to build the home/small office Asterisk telephony system on CentOS 4.4 server.

It is much appreciated if anyone can advice me on all the required Asterisk telephony hardwares/devices for this purpose, e.g. what model/brand to buy, the best place to buy (I’m based in Auckland, New Zealand) etc. I want to host this system in my home/small office by myself 24x7. If necessary, it is my appreciated if you can recommend the computer system/hardware for achieving this purpose.

If you can help with this, then I don’t need to follow the “The Future of Telephony” book to find out all the answers. In this way, I can quickly build the required Asterisk telephony system with the hardware/devices you recommend and just refer to the book when I build and test the system. This will save me a lot of time and on the right track.

Do you have the book/documentation on the same subject, i.e. “The Future of Telephony”, for the more newer version of Asterisk on newer version of CentOS, e.g. Asterisk 1.6.2 on CentOS 5.5 server.

If you have difficulty on this, please pass my message to the people who can help with this.

Thank you very much for the help and sorry for any inconvenience.

Thanks kindly,
David Su