Click and drag around area. easy to use for rectangular shapes and is terrible at anything else.
Elliptical Marquee Tool
Click and drag to create shape. Easy use for elliptical shapes, bad for anything that uses straight lines.
Magic Wand Tool
Selects pixels based on tone and color. You can use it by clicking on an area of the same tone. Good at selecting large areas, isn't always very precise.
Quick Selection Tool:
Click and drag to create a selection. it is fast and easy but creates ragged lines that are hard to control.
Lasso Tool
Click and drag to create a selection. It is fast and easy to use but creates imprecise lines.
Polygonal Lasso Tool
This tool is used by creating anchors to join straight lines together in creating a precise line. It is easy to use and very good at angles. This tool can't do any curves.
Teleporting Buddha And using the Magnetic Lasso Tool
Click and drag along subject and allow the line to search for the subject. This tool is really quick at selecting but also very hard to control.
Pen Tool - Dolphins
Click and drag to create an anchor point. The Pen Tool uses vector based math to calculate parabola's for easy curved lines that aren't calculated by pixels. At first it is hard to use and difficult to learn, but is really great at doing what it's supposed to do.