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One thing that helped me understand pointers was understanding that a pointer is just a memory address.

When I was still a noob programmer, my instructor merely stuck to words like "indirection" and "dereferencing" which are all fine and dandy, but learning that a pointer is just a memory address instantly made it click.

Pointers are a $1000 topic for a $5 concept.

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Well there’s a little bit more to it. There is a type involved, and then there’s pointer arithmetic.

Well yes, but those aren't hard.

Pointer arithmetic is merely knowing that any addition/subtraction done to a pointer is multiplied by the size of the type being pointed to. So if you're pointing to a 64-byte struct, then "ptr++;" adds 64 to the pointer.

Typed pointers interact with aliasing in "interesting" ways.

When I’m teaching (a very high-level language), I make a point of saying that a variable is a named memory location. Where is that location? We don’t know. Now, I am absolutely aware that the address isn’t the “real” location, but I have this idea that talking about variables in this way might help them grok the lower-level concept later on.

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