Sometimes, when you are programming, you need to know, where your data is in memory. This is what pointers are used for. They point to an specific point in memory, an address. You can then access the data from that pointer via the *-operator. This is called dereferencing. To get the address of an value, you can use the &-operator. To declare a type as an pointer to that type just put the *-operator between the type and the name.

As a site note: If you want to print out pointer with printf, you have to use the format specifier p. The address will be printed in hexadecimal notation.

For this introduction just familiarize yourself with the basics of pointers. You will be asked to use these concepts yourself in the following exercises.