When I first learned pointers in C, I thought they were very annoying. I would always run my program and then I would run into a segmentation fault error, and then I would have no idea why there was an error going on. It was just annoying to keep track of all the different pointers, making sure I’m freeing the right memory, and making sure I’m not accessing memory that I didn’t allocate yet.

When I learned later that Java and Python didn’t have pointers, I was in complete shock, and I wanted to learn those languages instead. Because why would I want to learn a programming language where I have to know pointers when I could do the same thing in another programming language and I don’t have to worry about pointers in those languages?

But when I got into the workforce, I started coding in Java and Python, and what I realized was my background in C and my background with pointers actually gave me a good foundation in software development and helped me understand a lot of things that Java and Python were doing for me under the hood. And so I could appreciate those languages better, and I also had better coding practices and coding mentality when I was coding in those languages.

So actually, learning C first and learning about pointers helped me become a better programmer overall.

In this video, I’m going to give a simple introduction on what pointers are, and then I’m going to go through three examples on how to use pointers in C. Hopefully, that will showcase why they’re useful.

This is really important because this is one of the main reasons why I recommend beginners to learn C—because it would force them to learn about pointers. And I think knowing about pointers is really important if you’re going to be a software developer.

This is also why universities still teach their students how to code in C—because knowing C gives you that good background information. So even if they’re not going to code in C in the future in the workforce, it’s still good to learn C and learn about pointers.

Thank you for watching, and happy coding! 💻
-Henrik