This comprehensive work thoroughly introduces and reviews the set of results from Belle and BaBar - after more than two decades of independent and complementary work - all the way from the detectors and the analysis tools used, up to the physics results, and the interpretation of these results.The world¿s two giant B Factory collaborations, Belle at KEK and BaBar at SLAC, have successfully completed their main mission to discover and quantify CP violation in the decays of B mesons. CP violation is a necessary requirement to distinguish unambiguously between matter and antimatter. The shared primary objective of the two B Factory experiments was to determine the shape of the so-called unitarity triangle, an abstract triangle representing interactions of quarks, the elementary constituents of matter. The area of the triangle is a measure of the amount of CP violation associated with the weak force.Many other measurements have been performed by the B Factories and are also discussed in this work.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part I The Facilities.- The B Factories.- The Detectors and Collaborations.- Datataking and Monte Carlo Production summary.- Part II Tools and Methods.- Vertexing.- Analysis optimization.- Particle identification.- Flavor tagging.- Background discrimination.- B-meson reconstruction.- Mixing and time-dependent analysis.-  Maximum likelihood fitting.- Angular analysis.- Dalitz analysis.- Blind analysis.- Systematic error estimation.- Part III The Results and their Interpretation.- The CKM matrix and the Kobayashi-Maskawa mechanism.- B-physics.- Quarkonium physics.- Charm physics.- Tau physics.- QED and initial state radiation studies.- Two-photon physics.- Y(5S) physics.- QCD-related physics.- Global interpretation.- Glossary.- Index.