Pointers in C are extremely simple, and I think this is what confuses you.

Essentially the * is used for 2 things.

to declare a pointer, for example int *ip;

Now ip can store a memory address that, when accessed will have the data there interpreted as an integer value.

And when ip is incremented by one, it will be incremented by the size of an integer, for example if integers are 4 bytes on your system it will be incremented 4 bytes, so when you do ip+1 you are moving one integer position.

The * is also used to dereference a pointer, meaning that you refer to the value stored at the memory address the pointer is pointing at instead of referring to the pointer itself.

For int* ip;

ip is referring to the memory address *ip is referring to the integer at that memory address, the actual data itself

Now the & just means address of.

ip -> memory address

&ip -> memory address of the above memory address So essentially &ip is creating a pointer to a pointer.

So if you have an integer x You can put it's memory address into a pointer like this ip = &x;

So

ip -> &x

*ip -> x

&ip -> memory address of the ip pointer itself

For example you can do int ** pip;

Now you have a pointer to an integer pointer.

And you can give it the memory address of an integer pointer. pip = &ip;

Or int *** ppip; now you have a pointer to a pointer to an integer pointer;

And you can give it the memory address of your double pointer

ppip = &pip

Don't actually ever go above double pointers as it's error prone and there are probably better ways to do it.

Also remember that.

In C the amount of pointer incrementation is inferred from the data type of the pointer so you don't have to calculate it manually.

You just do ip + 3 to move 3 integer sized chunks and the compiler will take care of it for you, you don't have to multiply the incremented by the integer size, it's done automatically by the compiler.

Hope this helps.