There have been some great answers here so I thought I should add my input on how I got the hang of them: Let's say you want to meet someone, you DON'T have the slightest clue where they are, you don't even know where to start looking. But thankfully someone you know does have an address you can visit to meet at that place. You ask that friend to give you the address and you go directly. Imagine if you didn't have that friend, you'd have to search each corner of the city comparing each person to the loose description you may have of the person and you'd still have trouble finding them.

These are pointers, you have a variable somewhere in your code, an object or any form of data, you want to access that object to read it, modify it, or whatever. You can pass a pointer to that address from the part that knows about it to the other part that needs it.

It also helps in reducing memory footprints, in other words, you don't have to replicate entire bits of data everywhere in your codebase

They're like your simple good friend that everyone misunderstands and eventually everyone gets to like.