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Best place to start is a book called Asterisk: The Definitive Guide. Here is a link to the PDF: {removed}

Supposedly a new book is coming out in October to coincide with Asterisk Version 16, but you can't wait that long, and you'll get the vast majority of fundamentals from the existing edition. You'll be better off buying the book so you can reference it without needing another computer screen, but I don't know what your financial situation is. It's available on Amazon for as little as $35: https://www.amazon.com/Asterisk-Definitive-Guide-Future-Telephony/dp/1449332420/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520700065&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=asterisk+the+definitive+guide%2C+4th+edition

Next, voip-info.org is a HUGE collection of voip related knowledge. They have a section specific for Asterisk: https://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk, but the site in general is very helpful. One word of caution, the site is a bit version specific and many commands have been removed (deprecated) in more recent versions. For more version specific information the Asterisk documentation has matured a lot in the past 10 years: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+13+Documentation.

For practical experience you can do one of two things relatively easily:

1. VM with softphone
   
   You can install an Asterisk VM on an existing VM host, or you can rent VM space somewhere like AWS. Using a softphone like Zoiper or XLite will allow you to get a feel for configuring an endpoint, but it can be a bit finicky to get the settings just right. For most, this is the faster cheaper option, but it does limit you to SIP only (no DAHDI/analog without a physical PC) and requires a fair amount of hopping around between software environments.
   
   
2. Old PC with cheap physical phone
   
   You can probably find an old PC around the office or a relatives house that is no longer being used. For testing/lab purposes, Asterisk can install on a very modest box (20GB hard drive, 2 GB RAM, single NIC). You could also install an analog card if you want to experiment with analog phones or trunks. There are numerous very affordable voip phones for a test/lab setup like this: https://www.voipsupply.com/blog/voip-insider/5-free-sip-softphones-and-affordable-deskphone-options/. By the way, voipsupply.com is another great website for browsing products and/or obtaining equipment. Just be careful about putting things in production because there is a reason some phones are $50 and some are $250.
   
   Both options are suitable, but option 2 is, for some people, easier to retain information because it involves physically touching components.
   
   Finally, you do need to express your concern to your employer. You need to emphasize that you want to do better work for the customers, and that given a little time each day to learn and troubleshoot you could be providing better service in as little as a few weeks. In order to maximize your learning speed though, you will need to spend some time on nights and weekends to get your head around this. It's not incredibly difficult, but there is a LOT of material. Start small and work your up. Master the basics before getting caught up in the fancy bells and whistles.
   
   Good luck!
   
   EDIT: I removed the link to the pdf.

You would need an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) such as this: https://www.amazon.com/Cisco-SPA112-Port-Phone-Adapter/dp/B00684PN54/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1525091775&sr=1-1&keywords=cisco+spa112

It will convert from the IP world of Asterisk to the Analog world of your home phone. Even better would be to port your phone number to a VOIP provider such as Flowroute, Google Voice, etc

you should get something like this and do some reading, if you're going to be in charge of voip, you gotta know your sip stack as well as asterisk.

but mainly asterisk will do SIP(of course), H.323, IAX and others.

but yeah... if you learn your sip stack.. you'll be on your way.

maybe https://www.amazon.com/Grandstream-Enterprise-GS-GXP2140-Display-Included/dp/B00HPAHKHE