A common allegation towards the NeXus file format is that there is virtually no software around which can read those files. This is plain wrong as will be shown in this chapter. As NeXus files produced at DESY are nothing else than HDF5 files with a standardized structure, every program capable of reading HDF5 files can access the data in our files.
Asides from the many software packages available supporting HDF5 there are bindings to virtually every commonly used programming languages. For some of them special libraries which, aside from the plain HDF5 support, also provide support for the NeXus semantics.
The minimum HDF5 version a software must support is 1.8.11 (which is due to the external filter support).