As you've probably seen, every project on GitHub comes with a file called README.md. This readme file is used in general to outline the goal of the project and usually includes some code examples. Markdown itself is not GitHub specific however, you can see it as another programming language that is being used a lot for documentation purposes.
Even the page you are reading now is also created using Markdown.
Markdown is not a syntax that browsers understand, it is however really simple to write and read with any text editor. Many online GIT platforms, like GitHub, will parse Markdown files and display them as pretty HTML pages. Another good example on Markdown support is Slack. You can style your Slack messages using Markdown!
A few examples of what you can do with Markdown:
| HTML | Markdown |
|---|---|
| H1 | # title |
| H2 | ## title |
| Emphasis | *italic |
| Bold | **bold** |
~~Scratch this.~~ |
|
| Link | [link text](https://somewhere) |
<p>Single line of code</p> |
use single `backticks` around your code |
If you want to show a bigger block of code, you start and end with 3 backticks
```
<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>...</body>
</html>
```With Markdown you can do more things like images, list, checklists, tables and more. Have a look at the following video:
{% hyf-youtube src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUBNt18RFbo" %}
A nice thing to keep in your favorites is this cheatsheet so you don't have to remember all the commands:
If you just can't get enough, here are some extra links that mentors/students have found useful concerning this topic: