The Markdown Tutorial

The Markdown syntax by John Gruber is a lightweight text-to-HTML filter. It lets you to mark up your text in a human-readable format, then use a Markdown parser to transform it into HTML. By human-readable, I mean that you define a ‘paragraph’ by a blank line before the following text instead of wrapping ‘<p>’ tags around it as you would in HTML. This is a much more natural way to write than using HTML markup.

This tutorial isn’t like other tutorials. You won’t be following along in a text file while you scroll down an HTML page. You will be editing the actual text of the tutorial, adding Markdown elements as you learn them. Markup elements are reused throughout the tutorial in order to ingrain the Markdown that you’re learning. The goal of the tutorial is to reinforce the syntax enough to eliminate the need to look up elements while writing your content. This tutorial format is inspired by the tutor for VIM by Bram Moolenaar.

Let’s get started: Click here to launch the interactive tutorial.

If you’re looking for plain text versions of the tutorial, you can find them here:

• The Markdown Tutorial
• The Completed Markdown Tutorial

If you found this tutorial useful, consider donating to the author.

The Markdown Tutorial by Ryan Hodson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.