Now it seems obvious that the intended recipient of your coded message needs to know the algorithm and the key, so as to decode the message; and equally it seems obvious that the algorithm and key must be kept secret from everyone else. And so you get the problem of how to let your intended recipient know them - after all, anyone who might be eavesdropping on your messages might be also eavesdropping when you send the algorithm and key.
Luckily, it's not as simple as that.
The algorithms typically used by SSL are so complex (typically taking several pages of mathematics to describe), and the keys used are typically so long (sometimes hundreds of digits long, when written in hex or decimal), that even if someone does know the algorithm, the chances of them guessing the key, or finding it by trial and error, are virtually nil. So, far from keeping algorithms secret, SSL uses well-known algorithms, which have been developed and published over the years by experts in cryptography.
When you are configuring software that uses SSL, it will generally ask you which of these well-known algorithms you want to use. Since the software does all the encryption/decryption for you, you don't need to understand these algorithms (you'd need considerable mathematical knowledge to do so), but you do need to know the names of the best-known ones and a little about their relative advantages and disadvantages. We'll cover this later. We'll mention some well-known ones as we go along.
You don't need to decide a key yourself, either. Instead, your SSL software uses a random number generator to create one.