There's an example in the "Putting it Together" section, showing JSON, a "human readable" representation of CBOR, and the hexidecimal bytes of CBOR.

https://cborbook.com/part_1/practical_introduction_to_cbor.h...

I'm assuming, since it's a binary encoded, the textual output would not be something you'd like to look at.

Why? I’m comfortable reading 0x48 0x65 0x78 0x61 0x64 0x65 0x63 0x69 0x6D 0x61 0x6C

With a table explaining what the byte codes mean? Absolutely I want to see that.

People look at TCP packets all the time.

In which format? As a list of 1s and 0s; in hex? TCP or IP if I just pasted the textual version of any binary data id captured without some form of conversion it's not good to look at. Especially if it's not accompanied by the encoding schema so you can actually make sense of it.

The encoding schema are also present for XML and JSON, but not CBOR, so yes, that’s another gap if the book is intended for a technical audience.