Data comes in many forms. There are two main file categories for storing/retrieving data: human-readable files and binary files. Examples of human-readable files are XML, RSS/Atom, YAML, and JSON. Examples of binary files are the .sq3 file format used by SQLite and the .mp3 audio file format used to listen to music.
In this example, we will focus on two popular human-readable formats—XML and JSON. Although human-readable files are generally slower to parse than binary files, they make data exchange, inspection, and modification much easier. For this reason, it is advised that you work with human-readable files, unless there are other restrictions that do not allow it (mainly unacceptable performance and proprietary ...
