What are the differences between rings, groups, and fields?

They should feel similar! In fact, every ring is a group, and every field is a ring. A ring is a group with an additional operation, where the second operation is associative and the distributive properties make the two operations "compatible".

A field is a ring such that the second operation also satisfies all the group properties (after throwing out the additive identity); i.e. it has multiplicative inverses, multiplicative identity, and is commutative.

You're right to think that the definitions are very similar. The main difference between groups and rings is that rings have two binary operations (usually called addition and multiplication) instead of just one binary operation.

If you forget about multiplication, then a ring becomes a group with respect to addition (the identity is 0 and inverses are negatives). This group is always commutative!

If you forget about addition, then a ring does not become a group with respect to multiplication. The binary operation of multiplication is associative and it does have an identity 1, but some elements like 0 do not have inverses. (This structure is called a monoid.)

A commutative ring is a field when all nonzero elements have multiplicative inverses. In this case, if you forget about addition and remove 0, the remaining elements do form a group under multiplication. This group is again commutative.

A division ring is a (not necessarily commutative) ring in which all nonzero elements have multiplicative inverses. Again, if you forget about addition and remove 0, the remaining elements do form a group under multiplication. This group is not necessarily commutative. An example of a division ring which is not a field are the quaternions.

A group is an abstraction of addition and subtraction—except that the group operation might not be commutative. But the important part is that there is an operation, which is something like addition, and the operation can be reversed, so there is also something like subtraction.

To this, a ring adds multiplication, but not necessarily division.

To this, a field adds division.

(Going the other way from a group, we have the monoid, which has addition, but not subtraction.)