5 Excellent Free Books to Learn Markdown

Last Updated on June 3, 2025

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 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.

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

This 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.

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

R 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.

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

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.

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5. 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.

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All books in this series: