Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to use protoc to generate code and serialize/deserialize data. We saw that we can generate code for directly supported languages and ones that need plugins installed. We then saw how to encode and decode data when we have access to the .proto file and, therefore, the type definitions. And finally, we saw that even if we do not have the .proto file and type definitions, we can get a semi-readable text format output, to help us get a feel about what data is encoded.

In the next chapter, we will learn the serialization internals. We will dive deep into the binary and understand how each kind of data is serialized/deserialized. This will use the skills that we learned in this chapter to get that new knowledge.