This courselet provides a hands-on exploration of two widely used lossless compression techniques: Huffman coding and DEFLATE. Learners will compress structured and randomized text data to evaluate how each algorithm performs under different conditions. Through practical experiments and analysis, the courselet highlights the strengths and limitations of each method—showing DEFLATE’s efficiency with repetitive data and Huffman coding’s behavior with randomized content. By the end, learners will gain an appreciation for the critical role of compression in reducing storage usage and optimizing data handling.