Joomla! is a content management system. Sections and categories allow you to organize your content.
The basic structure is:
Sections include Categories.
Categories include content items.
Section A
Category A1
content items
Category A2
content items
Category A3
content items
Section B
Category B1
content items
Category B2
content items
Category B3
content items
Section C
Category C1
content items
Category C2
content items
Category C3
content items
The content items are what you would think of as web pages in a traditional html site.
Both section and category "pages" can be created to serve (more or less) as the home pages for the categories and sections, respectively.
Although it makes sense to organize your work into categories and sections, you do not need to show these to your users. Using your menus, you can link directly to sections, categories and content items. You can also select numerous options for the display of content associated with each type of link.