Hi Keith,
Welcome to JavaRanch!
Yes, it's just a place to store a bunch of objects.
In real life, you have different kinds of containers for storing things in different ways: a box, a filing cabinet, a block of lucite. These different containers have different advantages and disadvantages: you can throw things quickly into a box, but then they're hard to find. You can find things quickly in a filing cabinet, but putting them away takes some time. And things inside a block of lucite are visible, and protected from the elements, but can't breathe, so you wouldn't want to put a puppy in there.
Java is the same way. There are collections which make it easy to store things, but harder to find them (Lists), collections that make it easy to find things, but harder to store them (Maps), and collections that silently throw away duplicates (Sets). The code you write to use each kind is quite similar, but the performance and capabilities are different for each kind.
This section of Sun's online tutorial is about Collections.
[ April 25, 2006: Message edited by: Ernest Friedman-Hill ]