Think of it like this: anytime you get stuff from the memory of your program (arrays, lists, strings, etc) and export it in a textual or binary format that can be exchanged between programs, moved over the network, saved to a file, etc, that's serialization.
Think of it like this: anytime you get stuff from the memory of your program (arrays, lists, strings, etc) and export it in a textual or binary format that can be exchanged between programs, moved over the network, saved to a file, etc, that's serialization.