Insider terminology usually isn't intellectual snobbery. It's a form of efficient communication between people with similar technical backgrounds in a narrow domain. Once such people are outside their domain, they're in a similar situation to everyone else. As Scott Hanselman says, "We're all amateurs".
The computer scientist Alan Perlis summed up the problem:
48. The best book on programming for the layman is
"Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's
the best book on anything for the layman.
But for their incompleteness, the Perlis's Epigrams wouldn't a bad crash course. [1] Peter Norvig's take [2] is also insightful.
To be honest, I'm in the No Silver Bullet camp [3]. This stuff is hard. When I might forget that fact, I pick up Knuth's TAoCP and conclude that someone spending more than 50 years writing less than half a book is pretty good evidence that this stuff is hard...I don't even have to look at the 30 rated exercises.
I can't know it all. In the days before the internet when my younger self believed I was up on things, it was simply because I didn't have access to much information. Now I know that I don't know most things. Fortunately most things are only somewhat interesting and there's always something shinier. I've learned that learning a lot doesn't mean I know very much relative to the sum total of what people know or what there is to know.
Avoiding terminology is the route to being like the person who buys a iguana at PetCo and then argues with herpetologists online. Words are how we communicate.
Good luck.
[1]: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
[2]: http://norvig.com/21-days.html
[3]: http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf