I self taught myself c++ many years ago as my first lang (no idea why, I must have googled how to make games and it came up). No internet, just some downloaded word docs and html pages I saved on flash drive and went to a friends house. I was so bad when I think back that it's actually funny now that I've become so proficient in it. I used to think the runtime was the compiler and my very first hello world was done in Word so you can imagine the torture I went through trying to get that to compile.
So the topic that took me about 2 years to get at this inefficient setup, (had finally gotten a sam's teach yourself in 24 hours at some point iirc) was pointers. I could never grasp them. It suddenly came to me one night when reading something about letters that it clicked, the concept had something to do with delivering letters to houses and each house has an address. Can't recall the exact details but man was it an enlightening moment.
So the topic that took me about 2 years to get at this inefficient setup, (had finally gotten a sam's teach yourself in 24 hours at some point iirc) was pointers. I could never grasp them. It suddenly came to me one night when reading something about letters that it clicked, the concept had something to do with delivering letters to houses and each house has an address. Can't recall the exact details but man was it an enlightening moment.
I googled pointer mailbox analogy and this is very close if not what made it click for me - https://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/notes/sx10.html