[nooyurrsdey]

Learning about Huffman Encoding in school was my first exposure to these sort of algorithms. I was an electrical engineering major and had little exposure to computer science at the time.

It captivated my interest immediately - it was such a simple and effective approach, and it demystified how compression algorithms worked.

I really like this overview. It's not meant to be a full discourse, more just an intro for newcomers. And I think it gets the basic idea across very effectively.