Is bitcoin mining completely automated? What I mean by "completely automated" is, if all the below are taken care of by the client, no human effort is involved.


Collecting the transactions 
Creating a new block


If possible can someone explain or redirect me to a resource explaining the whole mining process in detail with technical specifics.

Can a miner choose which transactions should go in which respective block?
Yes, these tasks are normally taken care of by Bitcoin Core or equivalent mining software.

I suppose in principle some miner could patch their software so that it asked a human operator to approve each transaction before adding to a block, or to participate in some other way.  But I can't imagine why anybody would want to, or what a human would look for in a transaction that wouldn't be easier to script.

For more general information about mining, see What exactly is Mining? The main source of technical information about Bitcoin is the wiki at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining (or a mirror).