Welcome! Today, we are going to learn about something very important in C++: references and pointers. This might sound a bit challenging, but I'll break it down for you with simple explanations and examples. By the end of this lesson, you'll understand what references and pointers are, when to use them, and how they can make your code more powerful.

Our goal is to get comfortable with these concepts so you can manage memory more efficiently and write clearer and more efficient code.

A reference in C++ is like a nickname for a variable. Imagine a friend named Alex, who you call "Al." "Al" is just another name for Alex. Similarly, a reference is another name for a variable.

In C++, we use the & symbol to create a reference. Here’s the basic syntax:

Here, x is an integer with value 10. We create a reference to .