There was a series of articles on lossless and lossy and compression techniques in, I think, PC Magazine that I read as a kid and made a big impression on me. I didn't, like, end up ready to write code to build Huffman trees or anything, but it did change it from a total black box into a bunch of smaller pieces each of which a mere mortal can understand.

The compression rabbit hole can be a rewarding one to go down if you haven't. Besides the tech itself making a lot of things work better (like a Web built on human-readable formats, or more specialized stuff like Parquet or other columnar formats, or video on the lossy side), it can give you some tools or perspective that apply elsewhere, e.g. to other probablistic stuff like caching and predictions for lossless compression, or other signal-processing stuff for lossy compression.