WelcomeIn this bite-sized course you will learn what data serialization is and how to do it properly. Data serialization is an important topic for anyone – from web developers sending data over the network to desktop applications and games where you might want to save settings or game saves onto the disk and then read them fast later.In any of the above cases you would like to have a fast method of preparing data for being sent and also read back on the other side. So I will introduce binary serialization and its benefits compared to the more widespread JSON or XML alternatives.FlatBuffersThis library is developed by Google and is a really efficient mechanism for serializing data. It is one of the two libraries available that are really poplular and the second one is also developed by Google and is called ProtoBuf which is used mostly for their other technology called gRPC. The FlatBuffers library is more lightweight and versiltile though and you can use it for so much more than ProtoBuf.I will be teaching the FlatBuffers schema language for the most of this course. But a lot of the ideas taken from FlatBuffers are also aplicable to ProtoBuf and gRPC communication. You will also be able to compile flatbuffers for other languages as well and not just for C++ – so you can have a C++ server and an EcmaScript client for example.
