Dead Simple Python

12 Binary and Serialization

01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001. This is the language of computers, the delight of hackers, and the subject of that one computer science joke you have memorized. If a programming language wants a chance to gain the admiration of elite developers, it must allow working with binary.

For the programmers who haven’t encountered binary yet, I’ll start by breaking down the fundamentals, particularly as Python sees them, and the different ways of expressing binary data and performing bitwise operations. With that foundation in place, I’ll cover how to read and write files in binary, and I’ll wrap ...