In this seminar cycle, students are guided in the direct usage of a powerful C++ library implementing many state-of-the-art compressed data structures for big data. Other than providing a walkthrough of the API of this library, we encourage students to write, execute and play with some small example programs based on such API (these examples are shown in the two slide decks). The instructions and the code to set up an environment to experiment with this library are available in the GitHub zip repository file. Finally, students are asked to test what they have learned by implementing a toy program that stores and searches through a dictionary of words. The efficiency of their implementation was then tested on a dataset of 2.8 million words. Both the dataset and a solution to the exercise are available in the GitHub zip repository. This seminar was originally prepared by Giorgio Vinciguerra and attended by the Algorithm Engineering students course held by Prof. Paolo Ferragina for the Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Pisa.