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White Magic
You need white magic to keep your party in fighting shape by healing battle damage and negative status effects such as Silence or Sleep. Cure and derivatives like Curaga are the basic health-restorative spells. Life and Raise revive your dead party members in battle. Esuna is a status effect reversal spell. Curative white magic often damages undead enemies. Life or other revivifying spells typically cause instant death to the undead.
Black Magic
Black magic includes all forms of direct attack magic, which is usually more effective than physical attacks. The different black magic spells fall into elemental subtypes; Fire, Ice and Bolt/Thunder are the three most common and usually the first you get in the game. Each of these spells, along with others such as Earth/Quake, Wind and Water, is strong against some alignments and weak to others, making for a game of elemental rock-paper-scissors. For example, using an Ice spell on a fire-aligned enemy will result in increased damage; using the same spell on an ice enemy heals it or does no damage at all. Lightning tends to work best against mechanical enemies.
Status Magic
Sometimes you need to make an indirect attack on your enemy, rather than cast direct damage to hit points. You may also need to boost your party members' abilities. This is where status magic comes into play. For example, Silence makes targets completely unable to use magic and special abilities. Darkness, meanwhile, removes vision, making them unable or less likely to connect with physical attacks. Berserk/Fury, as another example, has a twofold effect: it increases strength but lowers the hit percentage of physical attacks. If cast on a party member, Berserk removes the character from your control and causes him to attack at random.
A subset of status magic, informally called Time magic, affects characters' speed. Spells such as Haste, Slow and Stop affect how long it takes for a character to act after command input. For example, Haste makes the bar refill faster after action, while Slow causes it to take longer.
Summon Magic
During boss fights, you might need to unleash summon magic if the battle is going against you or if you just want to get it over with quickly. The summons go by various names throughout the series; Final Fantasy 6 had Espers, 7 had Summons, 8 had Guardian Forces, and 10 had Aeons. Summon magic brings a powerful creature or spirit to the field to unleash serious damage on your enemies or heal you; some of the most spectacular magic spells in the "Final Fantasy" series are summons such as Ifrit, Ramuh, Odin and Bahamut.