device files and mounting

[Garrett85]

I'M working my way the book 'Linux + Guide 3rd ED' and it's now attempting to educate me on device files and mounting. One of the first examples in the book is on mounting a floppy disk, not drive I'M assuming. When I typed in 'mkfs -t ext2 /dev/fd0' into the terminal I got an error: No such file or directory. Now I have several ideas about what might be going wrong but I just want to make sure I understand all this before I move along.
First of all my computer doesn't even have a floppy drive in it, I don't know why a book written in 2010 would use such an example.
After creating the fd0 folder in dev, I re-entered the command and got /dev/fd0 is not a block special device, proceed anyway(y,n)

Again, I'M assuming this is because I don't have a floppy drive in my computer but I want to make sure I get what's actually going on here before I move along. Seeing how I can not error check this problem because I don't have a drive. Thanks.

update

Now I've been told to following command to mount my cd rom drive: mount -r -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media/cd

What am I actually doing here? I can already through in a blank cd and view the non-existent content.

And this is what I get when I do:

# mount -r -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media/cd
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sr0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

[hazel]

1) Modern Linux kernels use a program called udev to create their device files dynamically at boot. So if you don't have a floppy drive, no dev/fd0 file will be created.

2) You can create device files by hand but only by using the mknod program or the MAKEDEV script (which many distros have in the /dev directory). Just creating a file in the ordinary way doesn't work because it's not a device file. Device files are not ordinary files; they are special. But even if you did use MAKEDEV, I doubt if the resultant device file could be used if you didn't actually have the corresponding device on your machine.

3) If you want to mount a cdrom, it must have an ISO9660 file system on it. A blank disk won't do.