My personal recommendation would be to learn and understand how pointers work. In the years I spent dealing with C and C++ I can trace many of my major learning

My personal recommendation would be to learn and understand how pointers work. In the years I spent dealing with C and C++ I can trace many of my major learnings back to how pointers work. You can't really understand pointers until you understand how memory is managed, including all the pitfalls and performance tricks that comes along.