Documentation with Markdown

So far, we have learned about the importance of documentation, as well as the best practices involved in achieving efficient documentation. One of the suggestions was to move toward text-based documentation that uses Markdown as a formatting style. In this section, we will introduce Markdown, discuss why it is so popular, and go through a quick crash course on the different Markdown elements and how to use them.

What is Markdown?

We briefly touched base on Markdown in Chapter 1, The Art of Documentation with Mermaid, and learned that it is a lightweight markup language. In simple terms, you can say that it is a language syntax that lets you specify the style and formatting of your text. The styling will show up once it has been rendered by the browser. Today, it is one of the most popular markup languages in the world, and the reason for that is because it's super easy to learn and use.

Basically, Markdown syntax is plain text with some simple...