Automated Birthday Emails - Sent 1 week before and on the day of Birthday

Aside from the Playbooks - which I'll give you a limited wizard, the really technical method has many steps.

1) Create your audience. Assuming you are using Data Extensions then you could build a Filter off your source data extension. You will want 1 filter for '7 days before ' so that filter criteria will be based on is anniversary of today - 7 days. Similarly you want a filter for 'birthday today' which will have criteria of anniversary is equal to today

2) Create your Filter Interaction and associate to your saved filter and output Data Extension

3) Create two User Initiated Emails - associated to the email you wish to send and the filtered data extension

4) create an automation - to add each components together i.e. refresh your filter interaction and send email

You could also accomplish your use case with Journey Builder. A birthday email is a basic use case so if you are new to Marketing Cloud then it's good for learning the various solutions possible to produce the same result. All the best learning it.

If it is birthday email, you can use the standard feature of sfmc - Playbooks

From the menu at the top, choose playbooks and then select Birthday Email to get started.

There are just 4 steps in this. Follow the guided tour and you can complete it.