I've been writing C since the 1980s. Sorry, this book is not just bad but astonishingly bad.

Your examples are just wrong. "Returning" has a very specific meaning in programming. An expression does not "return a value". A pointer very very much does not "return the address of a memory location".

The code example given was utterly awful. If you cannot see why that code example is almost guaranteed to cause problems, you might not want to continue in this discussion...