Q: Where do you live? A: At , , . That's a pointer. Now, at that address, there is a building with many floors. Q: On what floor do you live? A: Floor X. That's a pointer. Now, at that address, there are many apartments. Q: What's your apartment's number? A: It's Y. That's a pointer. A program manipulates data. That data is stored somewhere in memory. To access that memory we need a reference to it, that's what variables are. But sometimes, we need to manipulate the location of the memory itself. That's what pointers do, they are variables that contain the location information. Just like Amazon will ask for your house address so that it can deliver your package, you don't send your house to Amazon, only its location information. An index in an array is a pointer. An offset on the stack is a pointer. A virtual 64-bits address is a pointer. etc. More on reddit.com

Initializing a pointer creates space for the pointer itself but not for the resulting value... So char* p doesn't actually create the 1 byte needed for a char anywhere in memory. You have to do that explicitly in C. Add a malloc statement for example. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Basic-Allocation.html Also if you malloc don't forget to free! Welcome to C, where the memory manager is you, dear coder :) #include #include int main(void) { char *p = (char*) malloc(sizeof(char)*1); *p = 'p'; printf("%c\n", *p); free(p); return 0; } Does this make sense? More on reddit.com

Here's a book: https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Pointers-C-Yashavant-Kanetkar/dp/8176563587 int x = 5; int *p = &x; printf("%p\n", p); printf("%d", *p); A pointer (at least in C) is a variable that stores a memory address. I'll repeat this again: pointers are VARIABLES. However, instead of storing some kind of integer or float value, pointers hold memory addresses. On the first line above, I've defined a variable 'x' and assigned it to the value 5. Here, we're storing 5 in a memory block, let's call this block "x", which will hold two things: 1) the value 5 and 2) the address of the block. The address of the block just tells us where the value is stored on your computer, just like your home address tells a person where you may live in your town. In programming, your computer (more accurately, your computer memory) is the town. A pointer is more akin to an address book, but a "book" that has a single page with only one address. A pointer comes with two operators: 1) the address operator (the ampersand &) and the deference operator (the pound symbol *). The address operator gives you the address of where a particular value is stored in memory while the dereference operator gives you the actual value. The * symbol is also used to declare that a specific variable is a pointer in C. Going through the short snippet of code above, in line 2, I'm declaring a pointer with the variable name 'p' and then assigning it to the memory address of x (hence why I use &). On the third line, I'm printing the pointer (which stores the memory address) and that will ultimately display an address (in hexadecimal in the terminal). On the last line, instead of printing the address/pointer, I dereferenced the pointer to get the value stored at the specified address using the * operator. Here's another analogy I'll end off on: Let's say I have a class of 5 people and I've scattered random objects across the room. I give each person a sticky note that describes where they can find an object in the room. In this scenario, the sticky notes would be the pointers that hold the address of an object in the room. More on reddit.com

a pointer is an address More on reddit.com