Rendering is the process of taking your scene in Blender and exporting it to a format you can use elsewhere. The scene is captured from the Camera that you place in the scene. There are two Render modes: Image and Animation. That's pretty self-explanatory. Image will render an image of the current frame you are on, and Animation will render the entire animation (from the specified starting point to the specified ending point). There are different ways to render: using Blender's internal renderer or a variety of external renderers. External renderers may get you a nicer render but add a whole new level of complexity, so I'll just be showing you the internal renderer for now.
