Use a feed to only show a part of my blog

All I want to do is have my home page update the feed from my blog. First I don’t know how to put a feed in that will show maybe the most recent 2 or 3 posts and a sentence with a link. How would I do this? I saw php code but nothing happened when I put it on my site, can’t say I have worked with php before and my site is in html. I just don’t want to have to manually update my website when I post a blog. Any ideas.