There are lots of places where you can pick up a tip or two on writing Markdown. There are also a ton of apps, services, and utilities for making it easier to write Markdown.

But they're not all in one place. In fact, they're very much in the opposite of one place—spread out across countless dot-coms, dot-nets, and even dot-me's. No one has ever written a book on Markdown.

So David Sparks and I decided to write one.

Markdown, the third book in David's fantastic MacSparky Field Guide series, is 130 pages and 27 screencasts long. There's over an hour and a half of video. We cover Markdown instruction, application recommendations, and offer advice. We also threw in another hour of audio interviews with a few of our Markdown-loving pals: Merlin Mann, Fletcher Penney, Brett Terpstra, Federico Viticci, and Gabe Weatherhead.

Being a multi-media work, filled with audio and video, Markdown is best viewed on an iPad (iBookstore), but we also made a PDF version bundled with all the same audio and video files—if that's your thing.

The pride I have in creating this book is matched only by the gratitude I feel toward:

  • John Gruber, the creator of Markdown,
  • Fletcher Penney, the force behind MultiMarkdown,
  • Brett Terpstra, a guy whose energy for making Markdown utilities knows no bounds, and
  • Everyone else who's ever supported Markdown by talking about it or writing up a tip

This book is our attempt to build on all the great work and enthusiasm for Markdown, but more importantly, extend it to new audiences. We want to help people discover the power of plain text writing in the post-word-processor era.

I hope you enjoy this book. David and I certainly enjoyed writing it—in Markdown of course.

Get it in the iBookstore, or read more about it on my Markdown page.