The Secret Life of Circuits
An Illustrated Guide to Electronic Circuit Design
$90.18
- Hardcover
472 pages
- Release Date
10 November 2026
Summary
Electronic circuit design, drawn by hand and explained from first principles.
The Secret Life of Circuits teaches electronic circuit design the way a working engineer actually thinks about it: starting with the physics, using math where it earns its place, the workbench never far away. Across nearly 300 hand-drawn color illustrations, Michal Zalewski builds intuition from the ground up, showing how electrons move through conductors and semiconductors, what’s really going on inside op-…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781718504806 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1718504802 |
| Author: | Michal Zalewski |
| Publisher: | No Starch Press,US |
| Imprint: | No Starch Press,US |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 472 |
| Release Date: | 10 November 2026 |
| Weight: | 369g |
| Dimensions: | 203mm x 254mm |
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Critics Review
“Full color and packed with Zalewski’s own hand-drawn diagrams and workbench photographs.”
—Boing Boing
“It’s a balanced mix of practical knowledge, math, and conceptual explanations free of clichéd analogies.”
—Eric Schlaepfer, creator of the MOnSter 6502 and Snark Barker, and co-author of Open Circuits
“There is no better introduction.”
—Travis Goodspeed, author of Microcontroller Exploits
“Michal’s book bridges the difficult chasm between theory and practice with beautiful illustrations and an easy-to-understand framing of the physics of electronics.”
—Chris Gammell, founder of Contextual Electronics and co-host of The Amp Hour
“Providing hands-on experiments and insights that make even complex topics like impedance matching and antennas feel intuitive.”
—Colin O’Flynn, co-author of The Hardware Hacking Handbook and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Dalhousie University
Michal Zalewski
Michal Zalewski is a computer security specialist and an avid tinkerer with more than three decades of experience in electronic circuit design. He runs a popular, in-depth electronics blog and has published a number of hardware projects featured on Hackaday and in other venues.
He spent more than a decade at Google building its product security program and later served as VP of security and privacy engineering at Snap Inc.
He is also the author of two classic information security books:
- The Tangled Web
- Silence on the Wire
Along with Practical Doomsday, a guide to level-headed emergency preparedness.
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