# Serialization > If you have a complicated data structure, its representation in memory might ordinarily be scattered throughout memory. (Think of a binary tree, for instance.) In contrast, when you want to write it to disk, you probably want to have a representation as a (hopefully short) sequence of contiguous bytes. That's what serialization does for you. --- References * [Understanding serialization](https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/72102/understanding-serialization)