The Secret Life of Circuits

Name: The Secret Life of Circuits
Price: 85 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9781718504806

An Illustrated Guide to Electronic Circuit Design

Michal Zalewski

$85

Hardback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

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English

No Starch Press,US
20 October 2026

Engineering: general

A richly illustrated deep dive into how electricity and circuits really work - from the physics of charge and fields to the messy truth of real-world component behavior - by acclaimed security researcher and electronics obsessive Michal Zalewski.

A physics-first guide to how electronic circuits actually work, from the motion of electrons to the moment a microcontroller does what you told it to.

Real circuits don't behave the way most introductory books say they do. The hydraulic analogy breaks down at the transistor. Ideal component models ignore the parasitics that bite you in every practical design. Noise, signal reflections, and grounding mistakes go unmentioned, then ruin your first serious project. The academic textbooks have the answers, but they want a semester of calculus first.

The Secret Life of Circuits is the book that fills that gap. Across 420 pages and roughly 290 hand-drawn color illustrations, Michal Zalewski builds working mental models from first principles- electron behavior in atomic shells, the operating principles behind op-amps and current mirrors, the discipline of digital logic, and the practical realities of PCB layout and high-speed signals. The math is here when you need it, derived step by step, but the goal is intuition you can use at the bench. No Laplace transforms, no plumbing analogies, no chapters on winding your own transformers.

Zalewski has spent more than three decades designing circuits as a hobbyist and obsessive tinkerer. He draws schematics the way other people take notes. The illustrations in this book are the result- precise, generous, and printed in full color on a page that respects them. It's a book you'll keep within reach of a soldering iron and also leave out where guests can find it.

For inquisitive hobbyists who hit a wall in the usual books, working engineers patching foundational gaps, and anyone who wants to stop following tutorials they don't fully understand.

By: Michal Zalewski
Imprint: No Starch Press,US
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 203mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9781718504806
ISBN 10: 1718504802
Pages: 472
Publication Date: 20 October 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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 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 & Privacy Engineering at Snap Inc. He is also the author of two classic information security books-The Tangled Web and Silence on the Wire (both from No Starch Press)-along with Practical Doomsday, a guide to level-headed emergency preparedness.