But I should probably warn you against the idea that you can become a good programmer simply by learning to use some of the tools. That's like becoming a chess player by studying the rules of the game, and the mechanics of chess clocks. If you just want to make sure you can understand your more technical business partner when s/he talks shop, or even do some simple programming, surely, you can get a long way simply by knowing the syntax of a programming language or two and some basic UNIX. I've seen some self-taught programmers do amazing things. But for most jobs that are actually technically innovative, you're going to have to sit down and learn some stuff about algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and so on. (This is what I shall snobistically call "real CS".)
Fortunately, even "real CS" can, with lots of motivation, be learned outside of formal academia. I would recommend you start with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the book and three different series of free video lectures are on the net for free). In fact, even if your goal is just to understand the techies, SICP is probably still about as good as it gets, and the old Abelson and Sussman video lectures are quite amusing. Other great resources are ArsDigita University and OpenCourseWare.
Isn't it ever! If you all will pardon me for going on a bit more about my site squeezed books, one of the things that is very frustrating about trying to learn something about business, economics, and marketing is that you realize there is this gaping hole in on-line resources compared to what I know and love - computers, where you can do everything on your own.
Among the resources I know and use are:
Paul Graham's essays, like many people here (I prefer reading them on paper anyway, but all of them are available on his website);
Joel Spolsky's blog (joelonsoftware.com) used to have very good articles (lately it's not as good as it used to be); he had the best of them published, too.
Eric Sink's blog (software.ericsink.com); great articles on marketing and business for geeks.
There are good articles about the basics of business in the Trizoko online business journal: http://www.trizle.com/trizoko
On changethis.com you'll find a lot of great PDFs on business subjects (very good resource; there is good stuff by Seth Godin here)
For economics, I'm reading the work of Frédéric Bastiat, available online here: bastiat.org.
1. Read something
2. Try it out.
3. Ask questions of others about the results, then go read more, try it again, and so on.
Not quite so easy for economics, business and marketing.
For a non-hacker to judge the skill of a hacker is nearly impossible - it's hard enough for hackers to do it. PG discusses it at length: http://paulgraham.com/gh.html
If you want to start your long journey to become a hacker and less annoying to your co-founders ;-) there's at least http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
Perhaps your team can introduce you to the basic architecture and syntax of the web framework they've chosen, as well as the everyday version control and deployment steps.
http://www.academyx.com/training/san_francisco/programs/web-developer/
LAMP in 3 months for $2000. (Sounds about right to me?)
@Zak & @pg: "For a non-hacker to judge the skill of a hacker is nearly impossible - it's hard enough for hackers to do it. PG discusses it at length: http://paulgraham.com/gh.html"
This isn't necessarily/always true. A person can always be judged by their prior work, as in any other field. The actual quality of the "hacking" may be difficult to discern, but the overall quality of the product/s should typically be visible rather easily/immediately.
If someone's built a product that works and/or sells reasonably, that's usually a good sign!!