Odd that the XML and JSON sections show examples of the format, but CBOR doesn’t. I’m left with no idea what it looks like, other than “building on JSON’s key/value format”.
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.