lets say there is a site with a feed.  I want to pull the title and a couple of sentences off that feed and put on my site with EE each time it updates.  Can this be done?  If so, how?

Thanks!

Several choices, one is the magpie plugin. That’s how the feeds get pulled in from the EE site within the control panel (I think) you’ll find templates scattered about for magpie.pi use. The other is the feedgrab plugin, this solution stores the feeds in you sites database, which may or may not be what you are after.
There are other solutions similar to magpie, but magpie’s the only plugin I’m aware of.

The Magpie plugin should be included with EE when you download it. Details here.