The Secret Life of Circuits

An Illustrated Guide to Electronic Circuit Design

by Michal Zalewski

September 2026, 472 pp.

ISBN-13:

9781718504806

Full Color

Download Chapter 9: Basic Electromechanical Devices

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.

Author Bio

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).

Table of contents

Introduction

Part I: The Fundamentals
Chapter 1: A Primer on Conduction
Chapter 2: The Curious Case of Semiconductors
Chapter 3: Time-Invariant Circuit Characteristics
Chapter 4: Signals That Change Over Time
Chapter 5: Ideal Inductors and Capacitors
Chapter 6: Electronics at the Speed of Light

Part II: Circuit Building Blocks
Chapter 7: Voltage and Current Sources
Chapter 8: Common Passive Components
Chapter 9: Basic Electromechanical Devices
Chapter 10: Discrete Semiconductors

Part III: Exploring Analog Circuits
Chapter 11: Creating Circuit Schematics
Chapter 12: Arrangements of Passive Components
Chapter 13: Applications of Diodes
Chapter 14: Working with Transistors
Chapter 15: Operational Amplifiers
Chapter 16: Supply Regulation
Chapter 17: Other Analog ICs

Part IV: The Digital Realm
Chapter 18: Logic Gates
Chapter 19: Adders and Binary Math
Chapter 20: Memory
Chapter 21: Sequential Operations
Chapter 22: Analog to Digital and Back
Chapter 23: Clocks in Digital Circuits
Chapter 24: Toward a Rudimentary Computer

Part V: Software Eats the World
Chapter 25: Exploring Microcontrollers
Chapter 26: Talking to Peripherals
Chapter 27: Hello, World

Part VI: Making Your Dream a Reality
Chapter 28: Surface-Mount Components
Chapter 29: The Basics of PCB Design
Chapter 30: High-Speed Signals
Chapter 31: Electronics That Last

Epilogue
Index