Open Circuits
Open Circuits is a photographic exploration of the beautiful design inside everyday electronics. Its stunning cross-section photography unlocks a hidden world full of elegance, subtle complexity, and wonder. Our phones, computers, and appliances are made of hundreds of internal components, each precisely engineered to perform a certain function, but none intended to actually be seen. Through painstakingly executed, vividly detailed cross-section photography, Open Circuits reveals the surprising—and often accidental—beauty hiding inside the electronic components that drive our everyday devices. From resistors to LEDs, USB cables to headphone jacks, stepper motors to nixie tubes, the book’s arresting imagery transforms more than 130 components into delightful works of art. As you visually dissect the components’ insides, you’ll learn about how they work and how they were made. Open Circuits has something for everyone to appreciate, whether you’re a seasoned electrical engineer, an amateur tinkerer, or simply a lover of art and photography.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
16mentions
16people
2022–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For the amount of marketing and praise this book has gotten, I’m very unimpressed. I don’t mean it to come across snobbish. I just don’t see a take that’s in any way out of the usual.
While I don’t expect one book to teach it all, I would like to see how it compares to the current crop of books and why is it better. The sample chapter left me very unimpressed and the book looks like it’s meant to be more for a coffee table and less for actual hands on usage. I don’t see a way that someone would put this into practice without an accompanying practice/lab book. Otherwise, it reads like trivia that showcases how much the author knows. Great, I guess?
Speaking of covers, Open Circuits: Inner Beauty of Electronics has a much more honest yet intelligent cover to it. Each page is both informational and extremely well done. Someone who has no knowledge of electronics or electricity can walk away learning something because it shows how things physically work with photos. The visual itself is almost self explanatory as a still image of different materials and how they are arranged. In other words, it has information density that’s both attractive and impactful.
My actual picks, are the likes of Floyd or Melvino, the Charles Platt one that has loads of circuits to build, and of course the clumsy but informative Forrest Mims series of books. Then you can get into Elicia White’s Embedded or any other assortment of more advanced books on power electronics etc.
Open to be proven wrong but yeah. I would have expected more because I don’t know of any book on this subject other than Art of Electronics and maybe Microelectronics by Sedra (or Razavi) that gets this much praise. Yet it started getting this praise before it was even released.
Bashing AI is fun except even good old Sam Ben-Yaakov is coming around to appreciate how useful it is to pedagogy.
I remain skeptical.
- You didn't mention that he also co-authored the book "Open Circuits" that shows cross sectional images of a wide variety of electrical and electronic components. The pictures are beautiful.
His "secret" is basically sanding. Lots and lots of sanding.
https://www.amazon.com/Open-Circuits-Beauty-Electronic-Compo...
- Different take, but you might like Open Circuits too: https://www.opencircuitsbook.com/
The author does corss sections of a lot of electronic components and the more delicate ones were cast is resin first. Th "making of" is as cool as the end result!
- 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.
- To see literally what's inside electronics, the book "Open Circuits" is enlightening. Many pictures of electronics carefully sliced open with explanations of the internals: https://www.opencircuitsbook.com/
- This is especially common with a fresh USB port. I learned why recently from the book Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components. There is a mechanical component that is more stiff before being used, which can lead one to think that they simply had the USB connector the wrong way around.
I highly highly recommend the book by the way, to anyone on HN. Goes all the way from mechanical components to resistors, nixie tubes, CMOS sensors, processors etc. Excellent photography that reveals the internals, along with operation explanations and history for each component.
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