How many of these things can one really be missing and still call themselves a programmer? I'm self taught myself. Pointers? Really? You can learn pointers in about 20 minutes.
It's interesting, but it seems some people need a lot more work when learning pointers than others. I struggled with operator precedence issues when I first encountered pointers, but didn't have a problem with the concept itself. But I know people who never really managed to wrap their minds around it.
A basic diagram with some arrows explains pointers pretty well.