Making sense of Joomla! components I

What was I thinking? I want to create my first new component. What do I do? Clone it, of course. Take com_content let's and change everything to com_content2. Immediately there's a problem. No content.xml install file, so I clone one I already have.

I zip the three files together using this free zip utility, a Winzip clone. Then I get error messages indicating that I got to stick the xml file in the directory ../joomla/media/ so I do this and no error messages, so I guess it's installed, but how do I really know. There doesn't seem to be a master list of all the components anywhere, not in the administration menus or in the tables themselves...