Following is my best explanation. Can be used for building a PC or buying a PC.
Storage (Hard Drives/Solid States/NVME) are rows of book shelves. More Bytes, more books it can hold. Kilo < Mega < Giga < Tera. Read speed basically determines how quickly you can get books off the shelves.
Hard Drives are the slowest because it requires to physically move to individual shelves. They don't like magnets. With these you need to worry about RPM, which is how fast its parts move. Higher number the better.
Solid States and Nvme you have access to all shelves at once and so you can load any given file faster. Solid States are larger but slower than NVME. These have more limited writes but you usually don't have to be concerned about it.
Most modern memory sticks are DDR4 or DDR5. High number is better but either isn't an issue. Not interchangeable. Your system only supports either DDR4 or DDR5, that's because they have different shapes.
Memory (RAM) is basically a desk where you study. When you get books from the shelves you store them on the desk while you work. You often need to look over the book multiple times so it's good to have them on hand. Smaller than Storage, but faster. It's often cleared upon shut down however which is why you need to save your work.
Speed is also a concern. (How fast can you read the books). Measured in MHz, which is just "million things per second" (GHz is "billion things per second"). Match them between RAM. It's not critical but your computer will run it according to the slowest stick.
As for RAM size, 8GB is usually the minimum bit 16GB is decent for most people. It basically means how many books you can have on your table at a time. I'm a freak and have a 48GB RAM (which is overkill). You can only have a number of sticks that your motherboard (MoBo) can support. Whether you get two 8GB sticks or one 16GB, honestly, is mostly a concern on how many sticks you want. Most MoBo's have at least 2.
CPU (Central Processing Unit), now, is the person at the table doing the math. They can read from the books, jot down important details onto scratchpaper ("cache") and do a lot of complex math with the information.
Speed is the primary part of the CPU. Usually measured in GHz (billions of things per second). Larger the better.
Cores. How many different "people" are at the table lower bound is often 4 but can be 6 or 8. Higher sometimes better but diminishing returns. "Logical cores" are basically like one person doing the work of two.
Cache size is less important. It's how big the scratch paper the people are using is. You probably don't need to know exactly what is because you're probably going to be looking at:
The name of the CPU. There's two brands that make them. Intel and AMD. Both have similar naming schemes.
Intel is usually i🟥-🟨🟨🟧🟧🟧. The yellow squares are the generation, the red square is iteration within the generation, the orange square further differentiate between iterations. Higher generation is newer, higher iteration is more powerful.
AMD — specifically Ryzen — has a similar naming scheme. Ryzen 🟥 🟨🟧🟧🟧. Yellow generation. Red iteration. Orange variants within iteration. Higher the better on all three usually.
Sometimes CPU's will have "integrated GPUs" which do the job of of both. What's a GPU? Well...
GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit; also called Graphics Card or Video Card) is basically a group of millions of toddlers doing basic math independently of one another. They can't do hard math, but they can do a lot of math all at once. CPU will being multi-variable calculus while GPU will be adding two numbers a million times a cycle. This is why CryptoBros and AI people are gravitated towards. Blockchain and AI both need to do a lot of repetitive math thats not hard in isolation. Unfortunately, it also what runs graphics and other visuals ("shaders") in video games. NVidia and AMD are the two leaders in this field.
NVidia GeForce is split between GTX and RTX. The main difference is RTX is optimized for raytracing (drawing a lot of lines in 3dspace), this is what makes lights pretty. GTX is cheaper. Usually named 🟨0🟧0 where yellow is the generation and orange is a variant within it. As always, higher better.
AMD's flagship is Radeon. Numbering scheme is 🟨🟧00. Same as above for GeForce. I honestly don't have much nuances about this beyond:
VRAM. Video RAM. Like normal RAM but for the GPU. These are built into the cards so you won't need to purchase them separately. Basically, the desks that all the toddlers share. Not as important as they also use normal RAM. Some GPUs with lower VRAM work better than those with higher VRAM. Check reviews first to see how much of a part it plays.
Next is the motherboard (MoBo). Usually, it's decided last because what it can do is entirely dependent of everything above. It has to match or exceed the criteria of every other part. The biggest concern is dimensions. How it can fit in your computer case. ATX is the normal size Mobo. Mini-ITX is smaller. Micro-ATX is smaller than that.
Power Supply Unit (PSU) just supplies enough power. There are calculators that basically take into account every other part mentioned above and estimate the required wattage. A good adage is that the required wattage is at most 90% of the maximum watts of the PSU because it will put out less over time, though I would recommend 80% (if you need 800 Watts, get a 1000 Watt PSU).
All PSUs will have a rating attached from Bronze to Platinum. This basically means how efficient it runs when at maximum load. So if you're using all 1000 watts from the PSU, how many more watts will be extracted from your electrical system. Gold has 87% efficiency at maximum load and 90% at half load. Better efficiency sometimes means a better electrical bill but shutting down your system when you're done is also a solution (it will also extend the life of it — I abused my laptop but took care of my desktop and which is still working at full speed) Bronze < Silver < Gold < Platinum
PSUs usually are described as non-modular, semi-modular, or fully modular. Basically how many wires can you remove without the need of cutters. Semi-modular basically has the important wires unremovable (mobo and cpu cords) but can let you clean up cords if you're not using it. Fully modular let's you remove those as well. These modular cords are sometimes proprietary which makes getting one to power your new GPU hard because you inherited the PC from your older brother and the company that made the PSU went bankrupt 6 years ago so searching tech stores doesn't work and you have to dig deep into shady websites to find a cord that fits the needed sockets.
This a lot of info to take in, but reddit will love to explain it and if needed, Newegg reviews can discern individual parts and unlike Amazon the website is exclusively for tech nerds so they usually (usually) know what they're on about. PC Part Picker is also a site that let's you... well... pick parts. It will calculate the required wattage for you, identify any incompatibilities from the parts you decided, show price histories of the parts and compare various websites pricing. It also let's you flag parts and when to send you an email the first time it's pricing drops below a designated threshold or regularly send a list of products of a certain time and their current pricings. It also makes finding parts easier.
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