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> It’s especially insidious because once you grok pointers, they’re suddenly easy. But up until that moment, they’re slippery eels.

I'm sort of a C beginner myself. I understand pointers, and I do remember they clicked in my mind suddenly. The moment before, I didn't understand at all. I also love the quirkiness of this guide. Definitely going to give this a read.

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Do you mean the general concept or like: a is a pointer to an array of functions which return pointers to functions which return ints and take double arrays as parameters.

This somehow never really clicked (or actually it clicked and declicked somehow)

For me it was the practical understanding. I understood the concept of a pointer, but I wasn't confident in writing code that used that used them or (more importantly) reading code. I would see an asterisk, multiple asterisks, or ampersands, and would get confused with the code. I do think some of the issues I encountered had to do with the notation of pointers. The asterisk serving as a symbol to both declare a pointer variable and dereference one.

If you always read from right to left (and put occasional braces for readability) you can get through anything. Most tricky ones are in job interviews, while ones found in the wild will often make use of typedefs to break down the complexity.

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