Plugin for Maven

[Anshuman Srivastava]

Hi,
I am using maven2.0.3 and fairly new to Maven.

Anyone please tell me that using Maven Plugin is same as adding the
information in dependency section of pom.xml like --

<dependency>
   <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
      <artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>
   <version>2.3</version>
   <scope>provided</scope>
  </dependency>
.
If its not the same then what is the difference between plugins and these
dependencies?

Thanks
Anshuman