Demystifying Markdown

Name: Demystifying Markdown
Rating: 4.7 (11 reviews)

Learn GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) and Explore Markdown in the AI Era

Created byClyde D'Souza

Last updated 8/2026

English

English [Auto],

What you'll learn

Learn how to write content and style the content in Markdown
Learn how to insert tables, images and even code in Markdown
Create a simple static one-pager website using just Markdown
In the process, also learn GitHub Flavored Markdown

Course content

5 sections • 19 lectures • 50m total length

Welcome and introduction0:56
Explore markdown basics and the guitar flavored markdown variant, learn to go from a readme to a website or blog, and build a one-page site with no prior experience.
Introduction to Markdown1:56
Demystifying markdown introduces a clean, easy to read text file for rich text formatting, using non alphabetic characters to add bold, italics, headings, and horizontal rules.
A bird's-eye view of this class3:10
Explore an end-to-end overview of unflavored markdown and begin hands-on practice using GitHub, a sample repository, and Jekyll to turn markdown into a live website on GitHub pages.
Prerequisite checklist4:25
Create a GitHub account, fork the sample website to your account, and edit the index file to practice markdown; then commit changes and review the repository to learn publishing and readme guidance.

Adding content to your Markdown file1:31
Learn to format markdown content by adding line breaks with two trailing spaces, separating paragraphs with empty lines, and creating horizontal rules with three or more asterisks, hyphens, or underscores.
Adding emphasis to your Markdown content2:02
Explore basic markdown formatting by applying bold with two asterisks or underscores, italics with one asterisk or underscore, strikethrough, and block codes with a greater-than prefix for multi-line text.
Adding headings to your Markdown file2:35
Explore how to add headings in Markdown using hash symbols for six levels and the equals and hyphen methods for heading levels one and two, with a live preview.
Adding lists to your Markdown file3:36
Explore creating unordered lists with asterisk, hyphen, or plus, nest items across levels, and format ordered lists with numbers and periods.
Adding links to your Markdown file3:55
learn how to add links in markdown using inline syntax and the reference link method, including auto-detecting URLs and creating clickable text.

Adding images to your Markdown file1:59
Learn how to add images to a markdown file using the image syntax, including alt text and optional title tooltips, and see how the code outputs HTML for rendered images.
Creating and modifying tables in your Markdown file1:52
Create a simple markdown table with pipe separators, a header separated from data by at least three hyphens, and align columns using colons for left, center, and right.
Adding code to your Markdown file2:54
Learn to add syntax-highlighted code to markdown, using inline code with backticks, and multi-line blocks with triple backticks, including language identifiers for JavaScript and other languages.
All about the escape character1:10
Explore escaping characters in markdown to control formatting, such as printing asterisks, hash symbols, and backslashes, without triggering bold, headings, or inline code; prefix with a backslash.
Adding emojis and checklists to your Markdown file1:39
Learn to enhance markdown with emojis using emoji codes and copying them from an emoji list, and create checklists by using [x] for completed items and [ ] for remaining tasks.

Requirements

No previous experience is necessary. Even if you’re not from the software industry, you're most welcome to take this course.
A GitHub account will be required. Guided instructions provided in the prerequisite video.

Description

Markdown is one of the cleanest and easiest forms of writing rich-text content. Believe me. Once you learn the trick, you’ll wonder why you didn’t know about this before. With Markdown, you can go from writing simple README files (that look amazing, by the way!) to creating your own website/blog.

In this class, you’ll learn GitHub Flavoured Markdown (GFM) – a slightly more powerful version of regular Markdown – and by the end, you will also have created a one-pager website. Doesn’t that sound exciting?

And there’s more! As of August 2026, the course now includes an additional module introducing Markdown in the world of AI. This is not an AI development course, but rather a guided tour of the kinds of Markdown files and folders you may encounter when working with modern AI tools and coding agents. We’ll look at examples such as AGENTS md, SKILL md, and other AI-related Markdown files, explore how these files are typically organised and navigated, and see what you might find inside them.

The module also introduces YAML frontmatter, which you’ll regularly come across in AI-related Markdown files, giving you a practical understanding of what it is, what it looks like, and why it’s used.

Anyone who is keen to expand their horizon and is up for a new challenge is welcome to tune in to this class. No previous experience is necessary (even if you’re not from the software industry, seriously).

Follow along with each class module to learn a new concept of GitHub Flavoured Markdown and get one step closer to building a one-pager website. Think of this as a puzzle. Each class module will provide you with one piece of the puzzle, and once you’ve put it all together, you will get an awesome website that you’ve built using something as simple as Markdown.

Please do share your class project (i.e., a one-page website of either yourself or a celebrity) with this class.

Who this course is for:

Anyone who is keen to expand their horizon and is up for a new challenge is welcome to tune in to this class.

Demystifying Markdown

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Introduction4 lectures • 10min

Act Two5 lectures • 14min

Act Three5 lectures • 10min

Bonus: AI + Markdown3 lectures • 11min

Wrap up2 lectures • 6min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: