Can someone please explain what Bitcoin and Litecoin is and how to get started. Also I occasional hear of these extravagant build for Bitcoin mining are these necessary?
They are both a virtual currency, earned by mining them, or you can buy them. You get started by joining a pool, a group of other people that also mine bitcoins and the pay is given to you and others who participated, in terms of who sent in the most shares, or pieces of the puzzle. Getting started, download GUIminer. Then for the pool, the only pool I ever used was 50BTC I got my payouts and its good. No one really builds machines to mine bitcoins any more, there a are pre built machines that are called ASICS and all they do is mine bitcoin, and they do it really fast, they are blamed for ruining the bitcoin mining thing. Honestly don't get into bitcoin unless you are going to invest a LOT of money in getting ASICS. And don't mine on your PC unless you don't pay electricity, because a normal PC mining bitcoins will barely be able to pay off the electricity it uses, and I'm talking cents, for example my 6670 does 110 mh/s, and uses like 450 watts. According to this calculator http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ I would make 4 Cents USD profit per 24 hours. Gross would be 1.62$ and the electricity would be 1.58$.
This is a prefrence, but its easy.
But thats just my opinion others in this forum have a good thought about this.