Programming Books

5 Excellent Free Books 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.

Here’s our recommended free books to learn how to write in Markdown.


1. The Markdown Guide by Matt Cone

The Markdown GuideThe Markdown markup language is one of the most popular plain-text formatting languages available.

Learn the Markdown syntax with the book that’s been called “the best Markdown reference.” Designed for both novices and experts, The Markdown Guide is a comprehensive reference manual that has everything you need to get started and master the Markdown syntax.

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Read the book


2. bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown by Yihui Xie

bookdownThis short book introduces an R package, bookdown, to change your workflow of writing books. It should be technically easy to write a book, visually pleasant to view the book, fun to interact with the book, convenient to navigate through the book, straightforward for readers to contribute or leave feedback to the book author(s), and more importantly, authors should not always be distracted by typesetting details.

The online version of this book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. A hardcopy is available to purchase.

Read the book


3. R Markdown The Definitive Guide by Yihui Xie, J. J. Allaire, Garrett Grolemund

R Markdown - The Definitive GuideR Markdown: The Definitive Guide is an official book authored by the core R Markdown developers that provides a comprehensive and accurate reference to the R Markdown ecosystem.

With R Markdown, you can easily create reproducible data analysis reports, presentations, dashboards, interactive applications, books, dissertations, websites, and journal articles, while enjoying the simplicity of Markdown and the great power of R and other languages.

The online version of this book is free to read here (thanks to Chapman & Hall/CRC), and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Read the book


4. blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown by Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas, Alison Presmanes Hill

Creating Websites with R Markdown

With blogdown, you can easily create websites and blogs straight from R Markdown documents. blogdown integrates R Markdown with static website generators, so that you can generate web pages dynamically.

Creating Websites with R Markdown provides a practical guide for creating websites using the blogdown package in R. In this book, the authors show you how to use dynamic R Markdown documents to build static websites featuring R code (or other programming languages) with automatically rendered output such as graphics, tables, analysis results, and HTML widgets.

The blogdown package is also suitable for technical writing with elements such as citations, footnotes, and LaTeX math.

Read the book


5. Learn Markdown

Learn Markdown

Learn Markdown is a 12 page PDF that offers a very gentle introduction to Markdown, a language that lets you write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, and optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

The book covers the basics of this language.

It looks at titles, links, images, code blocks and tables.

This book is written in Markdown.

Read the book


All books in this series:

Free Programming Books
AdaALGOL-like programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages
AgdaDependently typed functional language based on intuitionistic Type Theory
ArduinoInexpensive, flexible, open source microcontroller platform
AssemblyAs close to writing machine code without writing in pure hexadecimal
AwkVersatile language designed for pattern scanning and processing language
BashShell and command language; popular both as a shell and a scripting language
BASICBeginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
CGeneral-purpose, procedural, portable, high-level language
C++General-purpose, portable, free-form, multi-paradigm language
C#Combines the power and flexibility of C++ with the simplicity of Visual Basic
ClojureDialect of the Lisp programming language
ClojureScriptCompiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript
COBOLCommon Business-Oriented Language
CoffeeScriptTranscompiles into JavaScript inspired by Ruby, Python and Haskell
CoqDependently typed language similar to Agda, Idris, F* and others
CrystalGeneral-purpose, concurrent, multi-paradigm, object-oriented language
CSSCSS (Cascading Style Sheets) specifies a web page’s appearance
DGeneral-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax
DartClient-optimized language for fast apps on multiple platforms
DylanMulti-paradigm language supporting functional and object-oriented coding
ECMAScriptBest known as the language embedded in web browsers
EiffelObject-oriented language designed by Bertrand Meyer
ElixirRelatively new functional language running on the Erlang virtual machine
ErlangGeneral-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional language
F#Uses functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming methods
FactorDynamic stack-based programming language
ForthImperative stack-based programming language
FortranThe first high-level language, using the first compiler
GoCompiled, statically typed programming language
GroovyPowerful, optionally typed and dynamic language
HaskellStandardized, general-purpose, polymorphically, statically typed language
HTMLHyperText Markup Language
IconWide variety of features for processing and presenting symbolic data
JArray programming language based primarily on APL
JavaGeneral-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, high-level language
JavaScriptInterpreted, prototype-based, scripting language
JuliaHigh-level, high-performance language for technical computing
KotlinMore modern version of Java
LabVIEWDesigned to enable domain experts to build power systems quickly
LaTeXProfessional document preparation system and document markup language
LispUnique features - excellent to study programming constructs
LogoDialect of Lisp that features interactivity, modularity, extensibility
LuaDesigned as an embeddable scripting language
MarkdownPlain text formatting syntax designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write
Objective-CObject-oriented language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to C
OCamlThe main implementation of the Caml language
PascalImperative and procedural language designed in the late 1960s
PerlHigh-level, general-purpose, interpreted, scripting, dynamic language
PHPPHP has been at the helm of the web for many years
PostScriptInterpreted, stack-based and Turing complete language
PrologA general purpose, declarative, logic programming language
PureScriptSmall strongly, statically typed language compiling to JavaScript
PythonGeneral-purpose, structured, powerful language
QMLHierarchical declarative language for user interface layout - JSON-like syntax
RDe facto standard among statisticians and data analysts
RacketGeneral-purpose, object-oriented, multi-paradigm, functional language
RakuMember of the Perl family of programming languages
RubyGeneral purpose, scripting, structured, flexible, fully object-oriented language
RustIdeal for systems, embedded, and other performance critical code
ScalaModern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based language
SchemeA general-purpose, functional language descended from Lisp and Algol
ScratchVisual programming language designed for 8-16 year-old children
SQLAccess and manipulate data held in a relational database management system
Standard MLGeneral-purpose functional language characterized as "Lisp with types"
SwiftPowerful and intuitive general-purpose programming language
TclDynamic language based on concepts of Lisp, C, and Unix shells
TeXMarkup and programming language - create professional quality typeset text
TypeScriptStrict syntactical superset of JavaScript adding optional static typing
ValaObject-oriented language, syntactically similar to C#
VHDLHardware description language used in electronic design automation
VimLPowerful scripting language of the Vim editor
XMLRules for defining semantic tags describing structure ad meaning
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