Storing objects

Nowadays, we take the ability to write data to a file and retrieve it at an arbitrary later date for granted. As convenient as this is (imagine the state of computing if we couldn't store anything!), we may often find ourselves converting data we have stored in a nice object or design pattern in memory into some kind of clunky text or binary format for storage.

The Python pickle module, allows us to store objects directly in a special object storage format. It essentially converts an object (and all the objects it holds as attributes) into a format that can be stored in a file or file-like object or a string of bytes that we can do whatever we want with.

For basic work, the pickle module has an extremely simple interface. It is comprised of four basic functions for storing and loading data; two for manipulating file-like objects, and two for manipulating bytes objects (the latter are just shortcuts to the file-like interface so we don't have to create a BytesIO file-like object...