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The XBRL Book

Simple, precise, technical

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Now available

The sixth edition, covering Calculations 1.1, the CSV syntax, with refreshes and fixes based on reader feedback, 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.