There are a lot of ways to decrease the number of stitches in your knitting. One thing to consider is whether you want a "left-leaning" or "right-leaning" decrease. Meaning, which way do you want the lines to go?
K2TOG is one of the most common decreases, and it's the easiest one for beginning knitters to master. Instead of knitting one stitch on the left-hand needle, you push your needle through two stitches and knit them together. Boom: done. This is a right-leaning decrease.
SSK is the natural complement to K2TOG. It is a left-leaning decrease where you… well, that part depends. The classic instruction is to slip the next two stitches as if to knit, put them back on the left-hand needle, and knit them together through the back loop.
However, you get far better results with other methods of SSK. My personal favorite is to slip the first stitch as if to knit, the second as if to purl, then knit both through the back loop.
SSK is a bit trickier to master. I will admit that as a beginning knitter, whenever I encountered SSK I just ignored it and did K2TOG instead. Nobody died and I didn't get arrested, but my knitting didn't look as nice as it could have. Designers don't specify SSK just to mess with you, they do it because it works best for that spot in the pattern.
The next consideration is the placement. I have had this go wrong, myself. If you knit the same number of stitches before decreasing on every row, you will end up spiraling the decreases around (when knitting in the round) or putting them on a diagonal (if knitting back and forth).
Sometimes this is what you want, as with a line of raglan decreases. Other times it makes a weird spiral so that the garment doesn't fit right and looks strange. I made several weird hats and twisting pairs of fingerless mitts before I figured that one out.
Image courtesy Flickr/fuzzjay
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