Thanks, I'll check it out. It looks like a good read, but I'm not sure it addresses my question, which is probably because I was unclear. I've struggled with how to ask it for a while.

I work as a programmer, and I find I'm constantly lost with regards to basic things (to others) like how the Internet works, and Apache, and threads, and performance issues, and a whole host of other vocabulary words and terms that everyone takes for granted. I'm not really concerned (right now) about learning about recursion or a mergesort, for example... I just need to learn this common, everyday stuff that everyone else seems to know. I feel like I don't even know enough of the basics to explain what I don't know.