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Open Circuits Book

opencircuitsbook.com

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Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131812 - Aug 2023 (30 comments)

(Reposts are fine on HN after a year or so, but if a story has had significant attention more recently than that, then we treat the post as a duplicate. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)

I ordered this book during it's presale a while back, as a gift for my Dad.

I was expecting it to be a standard coffee table book—some pretty pictures, you set it somewhere and it looks neat, but you don't refer back to it.

But now, as I've gotten deeper into digital and analog circuits, I keep referring back to it since I'm a visual learner—it has just enough description to whet the appetite, but the visuals are impeccable, illustrating the physical mechanism behind each bit of electronics in the book.

I bought another one for myself a couple months ago and have it sitting near my workbench, and I've already referred to it three times since then.

Ok, this is weird. I just saw this book on a YouTube short a few moments ago. And now I see it here. Interesting? Could be that this is trending but the paranoia within has me leaning towards the old suspicion: the Internet is a unique bubble for each one of us. LoL

Yeah, that's basically how I saw it (someone apparently reposted the YouTube short on another website.) I was actually intrigued enough to further look into it, and have no regrets about having done so.

As an electrical engineer, most of the sample pics aren’t first to see, yet, it’s cool to see the rest of them in the book, might order it.

I just discovered this book and have to say that I never expected to derive so much joy from looking at pictures of, say, cables.

Is this a coffee table photography book or does it teach you anything behind what's in the images?

There are descriptions. See the product page:

https://nostarch.com/open-circuits

Or better yet, chapter 1:

https://nostarch.com/download/OpenCircuits_Chapter1.pdf

It's an absolutely brilliant book, and if it were the year 2000, I would no doubt buy a copy. Being 2024:

1) I don't have as much time

2) The free competition is a lot higher

So I have not bought one. But each time it comes up, I consider it, realize I'd never have time for it, and sadly, don't.

There's a sample chapter which is representative for the rest of the book: https://nostarch.com/download/OpenCircuits_Chapter1.pdf

They are high level descriptions accessible to a layman I'd say. Experts in the field probably won't gain much from the descriptions however.

As an expert in the field, I disagree.

I can tell you that a polystyrene capacitor will be super-linear, a C0G will be quite linear, stable, and fast, while an electrolytic will be slow, highly nonlinear, and polar, and how that impacts performance.

You get a lot of insight into how and why from seeing the actual construction. As an expert, for a lot of these devices, I never have seen that.

I know some capacitors have significant parasitic inductance or resistance, but it's this cut-away more clearly visualizes where it comes from. That's neat and helpful! From some of these, I could probably even estimate how much inductance.

Even things like switches, I've opened a fair number of out of curiosity, but it's interesting to see the ones I haven't, and even for the ones I have, you see something new.

I think the expertise means I get more out of it since I have more information to connect it to. I can see why some of the things I know about devices happen, and be better able to interpret the implications of some of the things I see. Seeing some connectors from the inside, I can describe failure modes which I couldn't do before; I just new something failed. Now I can see where corrosion can come in, versus mechanical failure.

I feel like the more you know, the more interesting this will be.

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