ROS Basics: Setting up my first project

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I just want to make sure I'm understanding the setup properly. Maybe I'm missing something but I feel like there is a bit of a gap in the tutorial between where you are building essentially an empty project, and where they have you call premade functions/packages.

Lets say I want to start experimenting with LIDAR mapping using Hector SLAM (I don't have access to an odometer at the moment). I see the sicktoolbox_wrapper, hector_slam and gmapping packages. Would I just rosmake and rosrun those from where they are(which is what it looks like the tutorial is doing) or would I build my own project using:

roscreate-pkg LIDAR_testing sicktoolbox gmapping hector_slam etc etc rosmake LIDAR_testing

and go from there?

I'm using Groovy on Ubuntu 12.04.