Electrical circuits have always been a mystery to me. Those tiny components that look like Chiclets or jewelry beads somehow make a light blink, produce music, and detect motion. So I was happy to learn about The Secret Life of Circuits: An Illustrated Guide to Electronic Circuit Design, a new 400-page book by Michal Zalewski from No Starch Press, due in fall 2026.
The book is full color and packed with Zalewski's own hand-drawn diagrams and workbench photographs. He ran product security at Google for 11 years, and has been a dedicated electronics tinkerer for three decades. Zalewski argues that the usual way circuits get taught, where current is like water and every part behaves like a clean math formula, leaves you stuck the moment you wire a real component to a real power supply.
No Starch is letting anyone download Chapter 9, "Basic Electromechanical Devices," for free. It walks through switches, rotary encoders, solenoids, speakers, relays, brushed and brushless DC motors, steppers, piezoelectric crystals, electret microphones, and fuses — the parts that either move when you apply voltage or generate voltage when something moves them. There's a fun section on why pressing a switch produces a burst of electrical noise that can make a microcontroller register one press as a dozen.
This looks like a book that'll sit comfortably next to Charles Platt's Make: Electronics.
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