Now available
The second edition, covering XBRL Dimensions 1.0, is available for sale on Amazon. As a sneak peek, you can download the first two chapters of the first edition under the license below (Creative Commons). Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.
By and for technical people
Most XBRL books do not get into many technical details, because their primary audience is on the business side. While this is crucial to the growth and acceptance of XBRL as a worldwide standard for business reporting, XBRL does involve a lot of technical machinery. Software developers in contact with XBRL need to understand it in great detail. This book gets into these fine details. I (the author) am a computer scientist with a database background.
XBRL explained on a higher level of abstraction than just its XML syntax
The few XBRL books going into technical details mostly do so at the syntactic level of XML. Yet XBRL is semantically not XML, and learning it on a higher level of abstraction, on its own level of abstraction, helps focus on its important features, makes it easier to achiever better consistency and favors producing high-quality business reports.
Erratum (second release)
Minor fixes on the first edition will be made on a regular basis based on feedback ("releases"). These are only minor fixes (typo, formatting, layout, etc) that do not affect the actual content of the book.
There are currently no known issues in the second release (currently selling). You can see which release you have on the copyright page.
Erratum (first release)
This is a summary of the list of minor issues in the first release. They are all fixed in the current release.
- Page 138: The role type definitions are only optional for the default link role
- Pages 121, 132: References are broken.
- Page 135: "total" is missing on the last row of the presentated layout (this is what makes it a totalLabel preferred role).
- Page 143: Figure 6.1 shows the wrong layout (text block instead of roll up). Look at Figure 5.13 on page 135 instead.
- On some presentation layouts, the contrasts make it sometimes hard to read.
- There are ambiguities with the numbering schemes of figures vs. tables (the second release made them all figures).