Modules vs. Components in Joomla II

There's a complete set of tutorials in the Developers Manual at help.joomla.org. Mastering these tutorials should be the first step to learn programming in Joomla, it seems.

One of the tutorial pages makes one difference between modules and components very clear. As you can see in this tutorial page on templates "The Layout File", modules (mosLoadModules) go on the top and into the left and right sidebars. Components go into the center (mosMainBody):


<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" border="0">
22:   <tr>
23:     <td colspan="3">
24:       <?php echo $mosConfig_sitename; ?>
25:     </td>
26:   </tr>
27:   <tr>
28:     <td colspan="3">
29:       <?php mosLoadModules ( 'top', 1 ); ?>
30:     </td>
31:   </tr>
32:   <tr>
33:     <td width="20%" valign="top">
34:       <?php mosLoadModules ( 'left' ); ?>
35:     </td>
36:     <td width="60%" valign="top">
37:        <?php mosMainBody(); ?>
38:     </td>
39:     <td width="20%" valign="top">
40:       <?php mosLoadModules ( 'right' ); ?>
41:     </td>
42:   </tr>
43:   <tr>
44:    <td colspan="3" valign="top">
45:      <?php mosLoadModules ( 'bottom' ); ?>
46:    </td>
47:  </tr>
48: </table>