An Illustrated Guide to Electronic Circuit Design
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 tryThe 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.
Contributors: (W) 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 and Silence on the Wire—along with Practical Doomsday, a guide to level-headed emergency preparedness (all from No Starch Press).