Partly thanks to this subreddit I have now compiled a list of some books that I want to read about naval warfare from WW1-WW2. However, what I noticed, is that most books only go into detail about one ship type, for example battleships. There seems to be no book explaining which were the common ship classes at that time, how they came into being, and so on.
Of course I am not an idiot. I play lots of WW2 games including naval games, I looked at wikipedia. I know what classes existed and what were some famous ships for that. But I would like to know more! Especially since it seems that some classes only came into being after 1930 after the naval treaties!
I'm not totally sure if there's one comprehensive overview, unless you want to look up editions of Jane's Fighting Ships for the interwar period (which probably exist in a fair number of university libraries, at least they do in mine). A few options for you:
D.K. Brown's The Grand Fleet covers Britain from 1906-1922.
Peattie and Evans' Kaigun does Japan 1887-1941.
Norman Friedman has a whole host of books about the USN.
John Jordan's Warships After Washington goes into quite a bit of detail about how and why the five major navies designed their fleets the way they did after the Washington treaties. It's probably not an exact match for what you're looking for, but it's at least in the ballpark.