The Secret Life of Circuits: An Illustrated Guide to Electronic Circuit Design

By Michal Zalewski

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-amps and current mirrors, how digital logic works at the gate level, and how to carry a design from schematic through PCB fabrication to working firmware.

Photographed experiments. Real component behavior. The practical problems that show up in your own designs. Just the right balance of practice and theory: no Laplace transforms and no plumbing analogies.

Inside, you'll learn how to:
Reason about real components, including the parasitics, noise, and reflections that ideal models hideUnderstand analog building blocks like amplifiers, oscillators, and filters at the device levelWork with digital logic, memory, and clocking, and see how a rudimentary computer comes togetherDrive peripherals from a microcontroller and bring an embedded project to lifeLay out high-speed PCBs with surface-mount components and get them to work on the first try
The Secret Life of Circuits is for inquisitive hobbyists who hit a wall in the usual books, and engineers who want to close the gap between the classroom and where the work actually happens.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1718504802
• ISBN13: 9781718504806
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: No Starch Press
• Length: 472 Pages