What is a mount point?

I finally let Mandrake make my partitions from free windows space...now i cant go to the next section without setting up mount points...

what are mount points?

as everything in linux mountpoint is a file ( be precise), actually it is a directory where specific files and directories will be stored, you'll need at least three mount points:
/ - root mount point
swap - a swap file for memory management
/home - this is where users files and dirs are stored
then there are others like /usr - for programs installed
/var -where the variable files and dirs are
/tmp - temp directory and so on, the advantages to have mount points are first you can unmount a filesystem if not used, second if your system is going down (crash) you can save the files that are in /home and others, and reformat only a troublesome mount point.
Read the documentation with the distro it explains everything in an elegant way.

Is /boot an importan partition in itself or should it lie on the same partition with /root?

Roughly speaking, a mount point is what you call the partition. There is a device name associated with drives and partitions (ie /dev/hda1) and that never changes, but you can change what you access is called. /dev/fd0 is the floppy device, but you can mount that to /mnt/floppy and access it that way.

I understand now what a mount point but the device stuf about floppies may have been over my head...

I hope I will lear what all that stuff means...

Thanks for explaining them to me.