Modern FPGAs contains logical blocks as well as areas dedicated to hard blocks, including SRAM and DSP. Logical blocks are programmable and hard blocks are not. Having these hard blocks embedded into the chip reduces the area required and gives functions in those blocks increased speed compared to building them from primitives.

I'm still a little confused on this, do the hard blocks preform specialized operations decided on when the chip is made? Or are they a different thing entirely?

a little confused about what a flip flop register is?

Flip-flops are a store for a single bit. To construct an n-bit register, we would need n-flip flops. You have several types of flip-flops (T, D, JK, SR). The link here provides more details on flip-flops, latches and their operations - (http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~ehwang/courses/cs120b/flipflops.pdf)