[Retric]

Pointers are easy. I thought several people in our CS program how to use them in ~2 hours. What's hard for most people is thinking abstractly between what the code looks like and what happens when you run it.

Pointers are simply the first thing that forces most coders to consider that split. But, a reasonably competent JAVA developer moving to C can pick them up in little time. The problem is reading other peoples C code that looks more like line noise than structure. But, pointers are a tiny step along that path.