Basically mining is the process of adding transaction records to bitcoins investor journal of past history. Mining  build the network. Without mining their is no network and it will have zero value. You can say that bitcoin is dependent on mining. when you run the mine bitcoins then it is measured in hashes per second. Mining is used to introduce bitcoin in the system. Their is many types of mining like CPU mining, FPGA mining, pools, cloud mining etc. Hope it will help you.