What resources will help a non-tech person understand web development?

Odinsdream, Sorry - I should have been clear about that - I'm after lingo not programming languages.

that's an unfortunate turn of phrase, "lingo" being one of the programming languages they probably know. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ might be worth skimming through, although it's more general than "web programming" it will give you some basic backgroud.

http://www.web-redesign.com/ will give you a better grasp on the entire development & project management process.

Tangential - just curious why you say "I don't want to rely on my own guys' opinions", is it because you want your own independent take on things, or because you don't trust them to give a good "non-techie" view of things (or other)? Asked in the spirit of "I am often in this situation on the other side of the coin".

http://www.peachpit.com/title/0735712069 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735712069/qid=1121793554/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0066473-9347218?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) might be exactly what you need. It's a beginner's guide to planning, designing, building and maintaining a web site. However, it's targeted more at the people who will be working with web techies for the first time, rather than being a book that teaches you how to be a web techie.

There are enough aspects of development that you have to experience to realize, I'm not sure that a book would help you with that. chismear might have a good solution... learn how to work with them, then once you're sort of in, concentrate on picking up what they know. It's a hell of a lot more than what's in any book, if they're worth the money they're paid.

There are a lot of great weblogs written by web designers. Add them to your news aggregator and read them daily for a quick immersion in the world of web development. Find a couple of good sites to start with, and you'll soon follow links to other sites with similar content. One good starting point is Dave Shea's http://mezzoblue.com/ and his list of http://mezzoblue.com/related/. Or you could ask your developers for a list of tech-related weblogs they read.

Though it's five years old, Jeffrey Veen's "Art and Science of Web Design" is a good start, as is his partner Jesse James Garrett's "The Elements of User Experience". Good news is, Jeff's book is available as a free download on http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000747.html.