By the gods. What is this? Give me Brainfuck. Emojis. :-/

Eeeeh I know. It's likely that I won't come up with anything of worth.

But still I should learn something. Maybe. I hope.

Have you checked out Learn C and Learn C the hard way yet? What is exactly that you don't understand about looping/functions/pointers?

I have been interested in P2P applications for a long time, and so I'm (trying) to write a simple, simple, (anonymous and secure) P2P application. I am still at the protocol writing phase.

It depends on what language do you want to learn, and what do you want to mess with. A few (well, more than a few) languages (like Nim, that compiles down to C) have dynamic memory allocation and are garbage collected, so you don't have to manage that memory yourself.

In any case it depends on what you want to do - keep in mind that I usually don't go that low. But basically memory management is allocating (malloc on C) an area of memory and freeing it after you have finished with it. Don't use that area before allocation, don't stray outside it, don't touch it after freeing it and you should be good. It will be mostly the OS that takes care of, say, finding a free space in the heap and defragmenting it.

As for pointers... I dunno? They are pointers. Think of it like this. You have this big billboard, and you want to affix something. But it is very big, and you don't know where you can put your poster so that you don't cover anything useful, so you ask the person near the board where you should put it - the board would be the ram, and you are making a malloc call.
Then the person looks around a bit and points to an area that is partly covered with old posters. "There". That's your memory pointer (even if in this case the pointer is 2D and together with the size if forms a rectangle, but I digress). If you put your poster there it's all good, but if you put it somewhere else you might cover something important, or your poster could be covered. Once you have finished you can just leave your poster up, but you need to tell the person that you don't need that area anymore - you need to call free.

I love Python, and from time to time I'll be messing around with C. I am checking out Nim, too - syntax of Python and compiles down to C? I know a smattering of Forth, too, but I never used it for anything serious.

Ayup. For me, too, "programming" sound like you have something in mind, while "coding" sounds like you are just hacking together a quick script.