The book "Fields of Color" is short, math free, and largely organized by the historical progression of discovery.
> any indication of how these things are observed
In the last 50 years or so, the bulk of the evidence has come from particle accelerators, but there's been meaningful results from other experiments as well. Sean Carrol organizes the current state of physics into two broad categories: intensity experiments, like the LHC, which are attempting to reach energy concentrations we haven't probed before, and sensitivity experiments, which observe natural but rarely produced or interacting particles, like neutrino detectors.
> what set of data this model fits
All the data. The standard model is the best model we've found to explain all experiments observed in the history of physics.
> what is the nature(if any) of a quark independent of the hadron in which it is a constituent
Quarks and Gluons are bound together in the nucleus by the strong force. This force is, as its name indicates, very strong, however it falls off with distance sharply. The way it works out, the force is such that if you try to pull two bound quarks apart, the energy you add is sufficient to create new quarks. So lone quarks never appear, they're always bound into a composite of two or three, and if you try to pull them apart, you just end up making a second composite when they separate.
> But it seems I must spend some hours doing this before I can gain any understanding of what particle physics means, or how particle physics is done?
The blunt truth is fully understanding the standard model requires a lot of non trivial mathematics. I can't work with the math, but I've read through enough textbooks I've got some intuition for the big picture now. This isn't a topic where you can swoop in, spend 15 minutes, and suddenly understand it all. It's not going to just take some hours, it'll take much much more time than that.
Some topics cannot be simplified into a tidy summary that can be skimmed in a couple hours.