Diving In

On the surface, the concept of serialization is simple. You have a data structure in memory that you want to save, reuse, or send to someone else. How would you do that? Well, that depends on how you want to save it, how you want to reuse it, and to whom you want to send it. Many games allow you to save your progress when you quit the game and pick up where you left off when you relaunch the game. (Actually, many non-gaming applications do this as well.) In this case, a data structure that captures “your progress so far” needs to be stored on disk when you quit, then loaded from disk ...