I'm only halfway through reading Vol II, as I know next to nothing about AC circuits
Once you know what an inductor does and what a capacitor does, AC analysis is initially a lot like DC analysis, except with complex numbers. Complex just means they go on a graph instead of a number line.For me it feels like there is more to it that matters to both my desire to understand radio and my interest in understanding crosstalk. Since every wire has some inductance and every signal path plus return path has some capacitance, it seems as though every trace in a PCB or wire on a breadboard is an antenna and resonant frequencies may play a role in crosstalk; Fourier analysis and FFTs are at best something where I recognize the
words but definitely couldn't pass an exam. High frequencies should be required for these things to matter, but I don't have an intuition for how much they'd matter - for example, if something like a 14cm run of wire would resonate at 1Mhz, can that affect breadboard circuits? I don't know. It may not matter at all, or it may matter a lot; but either way, my lack of understanding means that it's not just a matter of applying calculus to the schematic, which is completely devoid of the details that I'd like to understand.
On the radio side there's no doubt that these things play a role in understanding how to design analog filters to receive certain stations, and while my main interest in radio is SDR (it's amazing what you can buy for not a lot of investment in SDR these days) the realities of antennas and antenna orientation cannot be ignored and require some actual thinking as I read through the AC book while the DC book was mostly "yes, I knew that" or "I don't need to know this" or even "I don't like how he explained this".