1.4. Markdown basics

What is it? Markdown is a just way to write text that gets formatted.

  • GitHub uses it when you open a repo in a website: In this repo, I have text that is bolded, italics, and code. There are headers for sectioning. There is a lot more you can do with Markdown, but that will give you a taste.

  • When we work in Jupyter, we will write python code in files called python notebooks (ipynb files, for “IPYthon NoteBooks”). In these ipynb files, we can have python code interspersed with sections of markdown text. As a result, we can write code and analysis that is easy to follow and execute. In other words, ipynb files are useful to create code that is reproducible, reusable, and shareable.

I’ll recommend four resources to practice and learn markdown: