tgz files
 

quick question because i see a lot of downloadables witha tgz extension as opposed to tar.gz...

is this the same thing?

Yes, it's exactly the same thing, although...As you will hear, Slackware uses the .tgz extension for it's packages and managment system, so it's possible to accidentally get a Slack specific package by downloading a .tgz'd file. Get the .tar.gz or tar.bz2 files if possible. Usually though it will say if it's slack specific or not also, so it's usually safe if it doesn't.