I am interested in electronics, in teardowns, and in electronics teardowns. Thus I was the exact audience for a book coming out soon: Open Circuits by Eric Schlaepfer and Windell H. Oskay. I preordered directly from publisher No Starch Press, which also granted me access to an early access eBook. I've finished browsing through that PDF and loved every page of it. I look forward to having the print book in my hand.

I first became aware of these cutaways from Twitter, where author Eric Schlaepfer tweeted a few cross sections shot with a cell phone camera via @TubeTimeUS. Feedback was positive, encouraging Eric to repeat the same treatment for more components, improving the techniques as he went. Things got popular enough that a vocal subset of his new Twitter following got grumpy when he went back to his regular programming. (Paraphrasing his reply: "Come on, guys, this account isn't @CrossSectionTimeUS.") Still, people loved the cross-sections and some said "I would love to have these pictures in a coffee-table book." Thus this book Open Circuits.

Every component cross-sectioned in the book is accompanied by a brief explanation of the component. Knowing what a component does and how its internals accomplish the objective helps give us context to understand what we see in the pictures. Sometimes there's a diagram with subcomponents called out as a visual explanation augmenting the text description. I knew roughly what some of these components did, but most of them were new information for me. But even if I had known of a component, usually I hadn't known what it looked like inside! Every page is a new discovery. Occasionally, I even recognized something that I've seen before. For example, I recognized a thermal switch as something I took out of a retired coffee maker but I wasn't sure what it was until I saw one explained and cross-sectioned.

This book is aimed at people who want to know more about what happens behind the scenes, so naturally the book covered that as well: the afterword section describes the techniques that went into this book's photography. From cutting and polishing of components, to cleaning and mounting, to the photography process. Starting with cameras and lenses, to macro photography, and finally focus stacking to compose the sharp pictures in the book.

If you've read this far, you will enjoy the book as well.

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I earn nothing from endorsing this book, I just love it.