So you've probably heard the word telephony thrown around from time to time. Maybe you were hanging out in a certain IRC channel, wanted to root your cell phone, or maybe, just maybe, you were actually interested in doing something cool with your computers and phones.

This article is the first of a series. I'm going to try my best to explain what telephony is, how it works, and how to write cool programs that integrate voice and data. Telephony is a huge market, and used everywhere (think cell phones). We are living in a time when telephony is casual, common, and popular. While being so huge, it often astounds me to think of how few programmers and tech people ever get around to learning about it, or playing with it. There are very few telephony programmers, and even less proper documentation. My hopes are that these articles will give you a solid foundation in telephony and inspire you to play around with it on your own, and do cool things.

Now that we've got the basics out of the way, let's get down to business...