Markdown does not have an extensive set of strict rules like some other

text formats so you should be able to read up on the basics with these

articles then write a few practice documents to be comfortable with it.

The following resources are really helpful when you are getting started

or need a quick reference on a less commonly-used feature such as tables

or block quotes.

* [Say yes to Markdown, no to MS Word](https://medium.com/@drodil/say-yes-to-markdown-no-to-ms-word-be4692e7a8cd)

provides a really awesome overview of why Markdown is a more usable file

format than Microsoft Word and similar proprietary file types. The article

also has a good list of useful Markdown-related tools such as a

[Markdown-to-PDF converter](https://github.com/alanshaw/markdown-pdf)

(a NodeJS package but easy enough to use with a basic development

environment).

* [reStructuredText vs Markdown for documentation](http://zverovich.net/2016/06/16/rst-vs-markdown.html)

brings up some really good points about the downsides to Markdown's

simplicity. First, a lot of documentation needs more complex output that

is not possible with vanilla Markdown so you need to drop into plain old

HTML, which defeats the purpose of using a markup language. Second, some

of the syntax around inserting blank lines by adding spaces at the end

of lines is confusing if someone is using a

[text editor or development environment](/text-editors-ides.html) that

is not configured to show blank spaces. Worse yet, if your editor is set to

remove blank spaces at the end of lines, which is fairly common among

developers, then you can mistakenly break the formatting intended by

the original author. Overall this is a good piece to read for a balanced

view of Markdown and the reasons it provides are one reason why I use

both Markdown and reStructuredText depending on the project.