Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, 9th Edition

Lesson 8

Pointers and References Explained

One of the biggest advantages of C++ is that it enables you to write high-level applications that are abstracted from the hardware as well as applications that work close to it. Indeed, C++ enables you to tweak the performance of an application on a bytes and bits level. Understanding how pointers and references work is one step toward being able to write programs that are effective in their consumption of system resources.

In this lesson, you find out

• ■   What pointers are

• ■   What the free store is

• ■   How to use the operators new and delete to allocate and free memory

• ■   How to write stable applications using pointers and dynamic allocation

• ■   What references are

• ■   Differences between pointers ...