JSON, Explain it to me like I'm 5.

It’s basically a way of communicating with someone in writing….but with very specific rules.

In prosaic English, the rules are pretty loose: just like with cage fighting. Not so with JSON. There are many ways of describing something:

• Example 1: Our family has 4 people: You, me and 2 kids.
• Example 2: Our family: you, me, kid1 and kid2.
• Example 3: Family: [ you, me, kid1, kid2]
• Example 4: we got 4 people in our family: mum, dad, kid1 and kid2.

Why don’t they just use plain English instead?

They would, but remember we’re dealing with computers. A computer is stupid and is not going to be able to understand sentences. So we gotta be really specific when computers are involved otherwise they get confused. Furthermore, JSON is a fairly efficient way of communicating, so most of the irrelevant stuff is cut out, which is pretty hand. If you wanted to communicate our family, to a computer, one way you could do so is like this:

{
“Family”: [“Me”, “Wife”, “Kid1”, “Kid2”]
}

……and that is basically JSON. But remember, you MUST obey the JSON grammar rules. If you break those rules, then a computer simply will not understand (i.e. parse) what you are writing.
json is similar to filling your name slip on a book cover.

In json your name slip will look like:

{
"name": "brij",
"class": 1,
"sec": 1,
"subject": "english",
"rollno": 25,
"school": "Public School",
"contact": 123456789
}

Here the name, subject and school are in quotes because those are strings (words) while class, sec, rollno and contact are written without quotes because they are numeric values (numbers).