Get Discount 10% Off
Subscribe to our newsletters now and stay up-to-date with new arrivals, updates and deals.
MILLIONS OF TITLES TO CHOOSE FROM
Currency
The Secret Life of Circuits: An Illustrated Guide to Electronic Circuit Design
Electronic circuit design, drawn by hand and explained from first principles. The Secret Life of Circuits teaches...
- $47.98 USD
- $47.98 USD
- Unit price
- per
Please hurry! Only 113 left in stock
Couldn't load pickup availability
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:
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.
Author: Michal Zalewski
Publisher: No Starch Press
Published: 10/20/2026
Pages: 472
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.57lbs
Size: 10.20h x 8.27w x 1.25d
ISBN: 9781718504806
About the Author
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 and Silence on the Wire--along with Practical Doomsday, a guide to level-headed emergency preparedness (all from No Starch Press).
- 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.
Author: Michal Zalewski
Publisher: No Starch Press
Published: 10/20/2026
Pages: 472
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.57lbs
Size: 10.20h x 8.27w x 1.25d
ISBN: 9781718504806
About the Author
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 and Silence on the Wire--along with Practical Doomsday, a guide to level-headed emergency preparedness (all from No Starch Press).
Returns Policy
You may return most new, unopened items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. We'll also pay the return shipping costs if the return is a result of our error (you received an incorrect or defective item, etc.).
You should expect to receive your refund within four weeks of giving your package to the return shipper, however, in many cases you will receive a refund more quickly. This time period includes the transit time for us to receive your return from the shipper (5 to 10 business days), the time it takes us to process your return once we receive it (3 to 5 business days), and the time it takes your bank to process our refund request (5 to 10 business days).
If you need to return an item, simply login to your account, view the order using the "Complete Orders" link under the My Account menu and click the Return Item(s) button. We'll notify you via e-mail of your refund once we've received and processed the returned item.
Shipping
We can ship to virtually any address in the world. Note that there are restrictions on some products, and some products cannot be shipped to international destinations.
When you place an order, we will estimate shipping and delivery dates for you based on the availability of your items and the shipping options you choose. Depending on the shipping provider you choose, shipping date estimates may appear on the shipping quotes page.
Please also note that the shipping rates for many items we sell are weight-based. The weight of any such item can be found on its detail page. To reflect the policies of the shipping companies we use, all weights will be rounded up to the next full pound.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.