/dev and mount
 

Is there a more user-friendly discription of the meaning behind /dev entries (or a link to some such)? I've always just sort of run these crytpic cantrips of mount this and that, to get at the cdrom drive, or to setup a new hard disk in fstab, but I never really understand why there are so many entries in /dev, say for something like /hda(*) and I'm curious why there are so many file-looking thingies in there.

Can someone explain the linux guts in a nice way?