The Secret Life of Circuits

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 hide
• Understand analog building blocks like amplifiers, oscillators, and filters at the device level
• Work with digital logic, memory, and clocking, and see how a rudimentary computer comes together
• Drive peripherals from a microcontroller and bring an embedded project to life
• Lay 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.