---
title: "Courses and labs"
description: "Guided lessons built from public university exercises, upstream examples, and safe hands-on data."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.serialize.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Courses and labs

These lessons teach the reasoning behind a workflow, not only which operation to click. Every lab uses synthetic or documentation-safe data, runs locally in the browser, and links to installable solution recipes.

- **Encoding, encryption, and hashing** — Learn why these transformations solve different problems, then compare reversible and one-way workflows. [Start lesson](/courses/encoding-encryption-hashing)
- **Decode until you understand** — Work through nested representations and learn when to use Magic versus an explicit recipe. [Start lab](/courses/decode-until-you-understand)
- **Compose and debug workflows** — Build multi-step recipes, inspect intermediate values, and correct ordering mistakes. [Start lesson](/courses/compose-and-debug)
- **Structured data lab** — Move among JSON, YAML, CSV, XML, and Jsonata queries. [Start lab](/courses/structured-data)
- **Indicators and network data** — Extract, normalize, defang, and parse common investigation values without contacting them. [Start lab](/courses/indicators-and-network-data)
- **Binary and file triage** — Use signatures, strings, compression, hex, and disassembly to form static-analysis hypotheses. [Start lab](/courses/binary-and-file-triage)
- **Time and identifiers** — Normalize timestamps and explain UUIDs, permissions, URIs, and IPv6 addresses. [Start lab](/courses/time-and-identifiers)
- **Analyst capstone** — Triage a synthetic alert by decoding a command, extracting indicators, and documenting a reproducible result. [Start capstone](/courses/analyst-capstone)

## Teaching approach

- Begin with a question and a sample, not an operation name.
- Predict the output type before adding the next operation.
- Inspect intermediate values with breakpoints or step execution.
- Replace exploratory Magic results with an explicit, reviewable recipe.
- Record assumptions about encodings, time zones, keys, delimiters, and trust.

> **Public-course foundations**
>
> The sequence draws on exercises published by the University of Oviedo, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Coventry University, UC Santa Cruz security students, TryHackMe, and the official CyberChef project. Serialize's wording, samples, solution recipes, and safety framing are original.

Source: https://help.serialize.dev/courses/index.mdx