Suppose you have a pointer a and you want to access data member b of a class.
Now if you will write:
*a.b
it will not work as (.) is evaluated before (*)

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But if you will write:
(*a).b
it will access b, because now (*a) will be evaluated first because of the brackets.

The alternate way is to use:
a->b
Now it is simple and there is not any confusion.

So, you can say that (*a).b = a->b, that is, both have the same effect.