Sampling is the art of taking one track or instrument from an existing song and then implementing it into your own music. It's a difficult topic to explain because it brings up so many issues regarding copyright, usability and it's necessity as a compositional tool.
The whole culture of modern electronic music was founded at least to some extent on sampling, and in the modern era many dance producers still use certain beat, instrument and even vocal samples. To some music cultures and genres this seems a betrayal of tradition. However, such is the range of technology available to composers and producers who implement samples that it's incredibly easy to make the samples sound totally different and original.
There are some cases when sampling is used that make it sound uninspiring and pointless. Take an electronic composer/producer when they use a dubstep sample and implement it into their own dubstep track. It's not very inspiring and sounds fairly unremarkable. However, if you took a classical sample and implemented in a dubstep track then that would sound very original and fresh, and that would put the used sample into a different musical context, or 'recontextualize' to give it it's fancy name.
Another factor with sampling is copyright. Many musicians have a royalties license from collection agencies like PRS and ASCAP. Composers/producers have to be extremely careful when implementing licensed music into their music, so they either have to pay mechanical royalties for use in their music, or risk getting a lawsuit filed against them because you can hear in their music that they 'nicked' a popular song. There are many good royalty-free tracks available online, so that's a good area to explore if you want to avoid the sticky issue of copyright.
Sampling is a very effective tool within music composition and production, so provided you can avoid the obstacles of copyright and stigma you could have a highly effective element to your music.
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