=head1 Serialization L is neat: it's human readable, portable across languages, but unfortunately the Perl implementation is buggy so that's unusable (other than for configuration files). L is in the core since 5.7.3. It's fast (because implemented in XS and using a binary format), but it's not human readable. The file format is forward compatible and the module versions are backward compatible, which means you can read all Storable-generated files with a recent Storable version, but only a Storable file generated by an old version can be read by all Storable versions. Storable has neat features like customizable per-class hooks and the ability to (de)serialize code references. L is in the core since 5.005. The output is human-readable as it's perl code. Data::Dumper comes with an optional XS part, but has also a pure-perl part. Deserializing is done through eval() which is probably dangerous, Safe::reval should be preferred. Deserializing is a little bit unhandy. Data::Dumper is also able to serialize code references. L is maybe worthwhile to take a look on XXX. L is a predecessor of YAML. L is a meta class for handling a couple of serialization methods together with encryption, compression and checksumming.