Michal Zalewski Ships 'The Secret Life of Circuits,' a Modern Electronics Primer

Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf) has finished and shipped his latest book, The Secret Life of Circuits, after more than a year of writing, editing, and layout work. Direct orders from the publisher are going out now, while copies from Amazon and Barnes & Noble — including several European sites and Canada — are slated to ship in October. The physical product is a premium full-color hardcover with roughly 300 purpose-drawn diagrams and illustrations.

The book pitches itself as the reference the author wishes he’d had when starting out: it aims to teach readers how to design their own circuits rather than clone existing ones, gives concrete technical answers without requiring a semester of calculus first, and prioritizes modern problem-solving over dated ‘circuit archaeology.’ It carries the same explanatory style as Zalewski’s blog, spanning low-level physics up through microcontrollers with hands-on experiments along the way.

Endorsements come from well-known figures in the hardware-hacking and electronics community, including Travis Goodspeed, Eric Schlaepfer, Colin O’Flynn, and Chris Gammell, who praise its balance of theory and practice and its intuitive treatment of tricky topics like impedance matching and antennas. Zalewski also cheekily includes a dismissive Hacker News comment about the layout as a mock endorsement.