Lately I've been seeing a lot of threads on, "What do I need, why do I need it, and why can't I..?"
It's great that this forum's members are able to help each other out (personally my favorite part) but it seems that many of these threads are practically identical. It's also great that new guys want to learn: This is the right place! All the information is here, it's just scattered around and takes awhile to find. So I post this not in the spirit of killing the Q&A sessions, but rather to condense the information that is floating around.
This is not intended to be a tutorial: There ar