Cook book

Each h5cpp example ships a README.md that explains why the code looks the way it does — the design choices, the on-disk layout, the trade-offs, the gotchas. Each cookbook page links out to the rendered example source at the bottom, so you can move from "what this does" to the actual code in one click.

Core call surface

• Basic H5CPP Operations — opening files, reading and writing the supported elementary types
• Datasets — explicit dataset creation, dims, chunking
• Attributes — Metadata on Groups and Datasets — attribute creation, read/write, fixed-length vs VLEN strings
• Groups — group create / open / traversal
• Custom Datatypes — registered datatypes, custom types, n-bit / two-bit
• Compound Datasets — compound (struct) types, packing, padding
• Supported container shapes — supported container shapes
• STL Container Showdown — STL types (strings / containers / tuples / arrays)
• Strings — VLEN Round-Trip Across Datasets and Attributes — std::string / std::string_view / char[N] / std::array<char,N>
• UTF-8 — Unicode Throughout the Identifier Surface — UTF-8 dataset names, paths, attribute values

Linalg & numerics

• Linear-Algebra Containers — armadillo / eigen / blaze / blitz / dlib / ublas / xtensor / itpp
• Sparse Matrices & Vectors — CSC Round-Trip — Armadillo / Eigen sparse matrix CSC round-trip
• mdspan — Non-Owning N-D Views, C++23 P0009 Round-Trip — C++23 std::mdspan round-trip

I/O patterns & performance

• Transform — DXPL Expressions and Type-Conversion Callbacks — read-time data transforms
• Optimized Inner-Loop I/O — performance-tuned write paths
• Raw-Pointer Read / Write — raw pointer overloads
• Packet Tables — Streaming Append — packet table (append) interface
• SWMR — Single-Writer / Multiple-Reader — SWMR single-writer/multiple-reader streaming (Linux-only)
• Custom Pipelines — custom filter pipeline composition

Tooling & debugging

• cout — IO-Debug Pretty-Printers for HDF5 Property Lists, Dataspaces, Hyperslab Arguments, and Handles — h5::cout handle pretty-printers
• Pretty-Print for STL Containers — STL container pretty-printers
• References — Region & Object Pointers Across Datasets — h5::reference_t lifecycle
• Smart-Pointer Support — smart-pointer interop
• Reflection — Compiler-Assisted HDF5 Serialisation — compile-time reflection (h5cpp-compiler emitted)
• Multi-Translation-Unit Compound Types — multi-TU compilation pattern

Format & file features

• Half-Precision Floats — Third-Party Variants — IEEE 754 half precision
• CSV to HDF5 — CSV importer (h5cpp-compiler tier-2)
• S3 example — Read-Only S3 VFD (ROS3) — ROS3 read-only S3 access
• MPI examples — parallel HDF5 + MPI patterns

How the Cook book relates to the rest of the docs site

If you want…	Look under
The narrative / design intent of an example	this section (Cook book)
The raw source of an example, syntax-highlighted	linked at the bottom of each cookbook page ("Source")
API reference for h5::read / h5::write etc.	the IO API or Files section
Architecture / inventory / taxonomy reports	Project Reports (separate section)

A note on extracting code snippets into prose

Doxygen supports \snippet <file> <anchor> — annotate a region of a .cpp with //! [anchor_name] markers and \snippet lifts that exact block into the rendered page. The Cook book pages currently link out to the full example source; selective snippet-lifting (showing only the relevant lines, similar to MkDocs :::include) is a per-leaf opt-in we can add as the examples mature.