what if I said "wheres minnesota?" Just kidding, but really, my point is (no pun intended) that for a beginner who knows nothing about the concept of passing information by value or by address, I would think a simple explaination that a "pointer" is nothing more than the address where a variable is stored. That makes sense to me, but so many books and 'tutorials' and whatever do a horrible job of explaining what a pointer is. They try to show you code, etc etc..
I just wish that when I first started working with C, someone had just said "Ok, a pointer is simply a memory address." Ok, thats simple. So, I'm passing an address. Awesome. I love the concept of pointers, just not the explaination of them.