Excellent Free Tutorials to Learn Markdown

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It’s designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write.

Readability is at the very heart of Markdown. It offers the advantages of plain text, provides a convenient format for writing for the web, but it’s not intended to be a replacement for HTML. Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters included, such as # or *.

Markdown has a much more basic syntax than HTML, leaving aside things like opening and closing tags, and instead uses punctuation and characters that all users will already use in daily writing. The punctuation characters have been carefully chosen to resemble what they mean. The intention is to ensure that the syntax does not stop the flow of writing, allowing the author to focus on content, rather than how it looks. In this way, Markdown shares a common bond with LaTeX, a document preparation system for high quality typesetting, which also encourages authors not to focus too much on the appearance, but to concentrate on the right content.

1. Mastering Markdown by GitHub

Markdown is a lightweight and easy-to-use syntax for styling all forms of writing on the GitHub platform. This tutorial includes information about GitHub Flavored Markdown, GitHub’s own version of the Markdown syntax. There’s a PDF version available.

Read the tutorial

2. Markdown Cheatsheet

This is intended as a quick reference and showcase.

It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0).

Read the tutorial

3. Learn Markdown in Y minutes by Dan Turkel and contributors

This is another brief tutorial that overs headings, simple text styles, paragraphs, lists, code blocks, horizontal rule, links, images, and more.

Read the tutorial

4. Markdown Tutorial

Each lesson provides an introduction to a single Markdown concept. The reader is asked to complete several exercises with that knowledge.

Read the tutorial

5. Markdown Cheat Sheet by Matt Broberg

This cheat sheet provides you with a baseline for writing and reading Markdown using the CommonMark specification. It also includes syntax for two Git repository services, GitHub and GitLab. Each service extends CommonMark to give users helpful shortcuts to common, or just plain fun, markup.

Read the tutorial

All tutorials in this series: