Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, Third Edition

Hour 11. References

In the past two hours, you learned how to use pointers to manipulate objects on the heap and how to refer to those objects indirectly. References, the topic of this hour's chapter, give you almost all the power of pointers but with a much easier syntax. In this hour you will learn

• What references are

• How references differ from pointers

• How to create and use references

• What the limitations of references are

• How to pass values and objects into and out of functions by reference