Input skipping in simple program!

[Jhax]

Hey guys so I'm just going through my programming book and I'm doing some exercises on functions. I have a function here that asks for the input of a character and feeds the value of the character back to main. For whatever reason, in the console, the input is skipped and the value of z is changed to
' '. I know I can put cin.ignore(); before the cin.get(); and it will work but I want to know why it works with cin,ignore()' and why it doesn't work without it!!

Any help would be really appreciated guys!

void getChar(char& z)
{
	cout << "The value of z currently is: " << z << endl;
	cout << "Please enter the new value of z.. " << endl;;
	cin.get(z);
	cout << "The new value of z is: " << z << endl;
}

[MiiNiPaa]

program outputs: "The value of z currently is: "
You enter: 5 <ENTER>
In input buffer: "5\n"
formatted input reads 5 and leaves "\n" in input buffer.
cin.get(z); is unformatted input function it consumes whichever character is first in input buffer. There already is character so it reads it, no input from user nessesary.