Someone told me That Serialization was not the best way to send things over a socket but they said they read that in a book once and was not sure of a better way cause they haven't really done networking before. so is Serialization the best way or is there a better way. Also this is for a game if that makes much of a difference. What i see by searching questions about sending objects over it looks like most people use Serialization but im just checking to see what people thing
To serialize basically means to transform into a state appropriate for some type of storage. Data being sent over the network has to be taken out of memory or off a HD and put in some format for being sent. It is ALL serialized.
People may say, serialized to XML or JSON, which is just a very specific TYPE of serialization. Then yes, you can have better or worse ones depending on your needs.