Now available
The fourth edition, covering XBRL Extensible Enumerations 2.0, 2020 data types updates, reference linkbases, 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.
Erratum (fourth edition)
No known errors yet. Reader feedback is always welcome.
Erratum (third edition)
Minor fixes on the third 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.
This is a summary of the list of minor issues in the first release of the third edition. They are all addressed in the fourth edition.
- Page 123: for negative labels, the sign on the display does not actually change. The label role described here and affecting the sign is actually a negated label role. They were introduced later and can be found in the link role registry. Many thanks to the reader who pointed this out.
- id attributes do not always correspond to the common practice prefix_localname.
- Some readers have reported that the inner margins are a bit small and make the read uncomfortable. This will be addressed in the fourth edition.
- There has been one occurrence of a copy that wasn't bundled correctly (pages falling apart). This has only happened to one reader to the best of our knowledge. Please do not hesitate to reach out to the Amazon Customer Service for a free replacement copy, should this ever happen to you.
Erratum (second edition)
This is a summary of the list of minor issues in the first release of the second edition.
- Page 123: see erratum on negative labels in the third edition above.
Erratum (first edition)
This is a summary of the list of minor issues in the second release of the first edition.
- Page 123: see erratum on negative labels in the third edition above.
This is a summary of the list of minor issues in the first release.
- Page 138: The role type definitions are only optional for the default link role
- Pages 121, 132: References are broken.
- Page 123: see erratum on negative labels in the third edition above.
- 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).