A Case for learning Markdown 🔽
March 2nd 2020
Background
When starting to learn web development you could eaisily become bombarded with all the things there are to learn. Between the core topics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript I found my hands full and really did not want to complicate my learning with any other noise.
I stayed away from JavaScript frameworks and all the other things for
as long as possible. I secessfully avoided looking too deeply into
those README.md files that were appearing in my projects for a long
time. However, when building my personal blog, aka this site I
found myself avoiding a solution to hosting my blog content since it
invloved Markdown.
In this article, I'm going to sell you on why you should learn Markdown and some of the resorces I found super useful to jumpstart my learning.
What is Markdown?
Markdown is a markup language (like HTML) that was created with the focus on being human readable. It's syntax is minimal and can be read by humans without being rendered.
Why Learn Markdown?
Markdown is used everywhere. It can be used to make websites (like this one), documents, notes, email messages.
If you're interested in development of any kind you're going to run into Markdown in every Git repo. For me it became super important to actually take time to learn Markdown so I couild properly format my README.md files. There is so much value in creating a useful README, and you need Markdown to do that.
Okay I'm Sold, How Should I learn it? 🧑🏫
Dillinger.io Dillinger is a super helpful web app that renders Markdown.
Here are some resouces I keep in my bookmarks
- Markdown CheatSheet This will help you 95% of the time
- Basic Markdown Syntax guide It's called the basic guide but that just means it covers all the 'basic' aka core syntax. It's great since it includes "good" and "bad" examples.
Conclusion
I found that spending some time actually learning the best parts of Markdown has been super useful. Like I mentioned before this site and page is written in markdown and being rendered by NextJS ➕ MDX.
References 👩💻
Official Markdown docs Getting Started - Markdowns getting started guide
March 1st 2020