DAC stands for "digital to analog converter." Since the Arduino does not have analog out capabilities, we need to use a DAC to convert digital data (numbers/ints/bytes) to an analog waveform (oscillating voltage). A simple, easy to program, and cheap way to do this is to use something called an R2R resistor ladder. Essentially, it takes incoming digital bits (0V and 5V from Arduino), weights them, and sums them to produce a voltage between 0 and 5 volts (see the schematic in fig 2, taken from the Wikipedia resistor ladder page). You can think of a resistor ladder as a multi-leveled voltage divider.
The resistor ladder I'll be demonstrating in this tutorial is an 8-bit DAC, this means it can produce 256 (2^8) different voltage levels between 0 and 5v. I connected each of digital pins 0-7 to each of the 8 junctions in my 8 bit DAC (shown in figs 1 and 3).
I like using these resistor ladder DACs because I always have the materials around, they're cheap, and I think they're kind of fun, but they will not give you the highest quality audio. You can buy a chip that works in the exact same was as an R2R DAC (and will work with all the code in this instructable), but has internal, highly-matched resistors for better audio quality, I like this one bc it runs off a single 5V supply (you can even do stereo audio with it), but there are many more available, look for "parallel input, 8 bit, dac ic".
Alternatively, there are chips that take in serial data to perform digital to analog conversion. These chips are generally higher fidelity (definitely better quality that the resistor ladder DAC) and they only use two or three of the Arduino's output pins (as opposed to 8). Downsides are they are a little more challenging to program, more expensive, and will not work with the code in this Instructable, though I'm sure there are some other tutorials available. After a quick search on digikey, these looked good, for Arduino, try to find something that will run off a single 5V supply.
One more note - there seems to be kind of a misconception abut 8 bit audio- that it always has to sound like the sounds effects from a Mario game- but 8bit audio with this really basic DAC can actually replicate the sounds of people's voices and instruments really well, I'm always amazed at the quality of sound that can come from a bunch of resistors.