Are you talking about the book? My impression of it is that it seems to be more about how to operate a camera in manual mode, and I've got that down. What I'm looking for is more related to understanding how the camera equipment works. For example, if I were to buy a new lens, I wouldn't really know how to read what the properties different lenses mean. Does the book go into these details as well?
Focal length - Basically gives you the angle of view
Sensor size - Size of the imaging sensor. This also affects angle of view because a bigger sensor will capture a bigger picture. Usually big full frame sensors (size of 35mm film) are used as the default and you use crop factors to convert focal lengths. Focal length never changes, but a 50mm lens on a 1.5x crop camera will give the same angle of view as a 75mm lens on a 1x crop camera.
Bigger sensor also typically equals better image quality, but they're much more expensive to produce. A lens with a focal length of say 200mm also has to be roughly 200mm long so long tele lenses end up being really big.
Aperture - Size of the lens pupil. Aperture is defined as the value you have to divide the focal length by so a smaller value means a bigger aperture. It takes some getting used to. Aperture tell you how bright the lens is and if you multiply with 1.4 (square root of 2) you halve the brightness.
f/1 - f/1.4 - f/2 - f/2.8 etc
Like I said with it being a factor of the focal length you can maybe see that a 200mm lens with an f/2 aperture would have to be pretty big. The aperture diameter in that lens is 100mm which means the glass has to be massive.
Aperture also affects depth of field together with focal length (not quite, but it helps to look at it this way). So if you take a picture of someone at 200mm and f/2 the background will just be blur where as if you use 28mm at f/11 it'll be pretty much in focus.
Making it smaller is called stopping it down and is used to change the property of the lens. Using a, say, f/2.8 lens at f/2.8 is called using it wide open. The bigger the aperture the faster the lens is said to be because you can use a fast shutter speed.
Zoom and prime - Prime have a fixed focal length while zooms can change focal length. Primes are usually smaller, simpler and superior in image quality and have a bigger aperture, but there's a lot of money put into zoom development making them good enough for most users and way more practical. Zooms can also be cheaper when you factor in the cost of multiple primes. Nothing I said was absolute either, you have tiny primes that have smaller apertures than some zooms and especially some older primes can have lower image quality.
Lens imperfections - There are a ton. All lenses are somewhat corrected, but in different ways. Generally imperfections that lower sharpness can be fixed by stopping down the aperture, but as you reach a point making it smaller makes the entire image softer due to something known as diffraction. It's a physical property that cannot be fixed.
Focus, basically whether focus plane is flat. Not that important when you're taking a headshot, but important for a landscape or taking pictures of something flat.
Chromatic aberration, color fringes. You can see this either as color fringes around high constrast scenes like tree branches in front of a sky or in high contrast scenes with out of focus objects.
Note specs ahead of focus are purple, behind focus are green.
Distortion, how straight lines are. Barrel distortion will look kinda like a fisheye while pincushion will look like the opposite. Unless it's really bad this is easy to fix with software and most cameras do it automatically.
. Oh well, I got plenty of good shots over the last six months, so I can't be too disappointed. Hopefully it gets even cheaper once Sony starts announcing their A7 line refresh models, which I imagine will be later this year.
