"&error" question !

so Amit actually describes what a pointer to a pointer actually does a little incorrectly.
when initialized NSError *error = nil; NSError is actually holding the value 0. When we actually have an error we need to initialize memory in the heap and let NSError point to it. so lets say that we pass in the pointer instead of the pointer to a pointer.

If we pass in just a pointer. In the caller:
NSError *error = nil;
NSDictionary *dataDictionary = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:jsonData options:0 error:error];
// NSError will still be 0 here since we pass in by value.

in the callee:
// in the beginning of the code, error = 0
//error occurred
error = [[NSError alloc] initWith....]; // error = [address memory in heap ex:1000]

So in the callee, error becomes pointed to a new memory space in the heap.
But in the caller the error is still pointed to nil.

One way to solve this is to allocated and initialize error in the caller and have the callee modify the object, but that would mean that we allocate space (CPU extensive) every time we need to call this JSONObjectWithData function.

Hopefully that helps.