Many “freshman” programmers do not fully understand or appreciate pointers in the C language. When I wanted to learn about pointers— variables that contain a memory address— I took a book on summer ...

Pointers — you either love them, or you haven’t fully understood them yet. But before you storm off to the comment section now, pointers are indeed a polarizing subject and are both C&#… ...

Programming C without variables is like, well, programming C without variables. They are so essential to the language that it doesn’t even require an analogy here. We can declare and use them… ...

However from the books and tutorials that I've been using I haven't come across a strategy or rule of thumb for when I should be using pointers and references and when I should not.