1.1 Note-taking with Markdown
Everything you write for the rest of this course goes into notes: what you built, what broke, and how you fixed it. Before the note-taking app arrives in the next lesson, you need the format those notes are written in, and it takes about twenty minutes to learn all of it.
That format is Markdown: plain text with a little punctuation that
means something. **bold** renders as bold, a line starting with
# becomes a heading, and the file stays perfectly readable even if
nothing is rendering it. That last property is why it won. Your notes,
this course, GitHub READMEs, and half the documentation on the internet
are all Markdown.
You don't need any special software today. Notepad, TextEdit, or whatever editor you already have is fine; the app that makes these notes searchable and linkable comes in lesson 1.2.
The whole syntax you need
# A heading
## A smaller heading
Plain text is just plain text. Leave a blank line between paragraphs.
- A bullet point
- Another one
- Indent two spaces for a sub-point
1. Numbered lists
2. Number themselves, mostly
**bold** and *italic*
[a link](https://example.com)
`inline code` for commands and filenames mid-sentence
```bash
# A fenced code block, for anything longer than one command.
# The word after the backticks (bash, powershell) turns on
# syntax coloring.
echo "like this"
```
That's it. There are more features (tables, quotes, footnotes) and you'll absorb them when you meet them. Don't study Markdown; use it.
Why plain text, though
Because in this field, plain text survives everything. Word documents
need Word. Notion needs Notion's servers to stay in business. A .md
file opens on any machine you'll ever touch, diffs cleanly in Git (which
matters in lesson 1.3), and will still open in thirty years. Every config
file, every script, and every log you'll meet in this course is plain
text too, so you might as well live there.
Do this now
Take the Module 0 journal entry you wrote in lesson 0.5 and rewrite it as
a Markdown file called module-0.md. Give it a heading, put your four
facts (why, machine, tier, hours) under sub-headings, and format your RAM
and disk numbers as inline code. Any text editor works; Notepad works.
You will see the # and the ** characters, exactly as you typed them.
Nothing is wrong. A plain text editor shows you plain text, and Markdown is
plain text. The app that turns it into headings and bold arrives in lesson
1.2, and the file you write today is already the finished article. That's the
point made above about the file staying readable whether or not anything is
rendering it, and this is the moment you actually see it.
Recent Windows 11 versions of Notepad added a little Markdown formatting of their own, so you may instead see real bold text and a formatting toolbar. That's fine too. Either view is the same file on disk.
Notepad: set "Save as type" to "All Files" before you save. If you leave
it on "Text Documents", Notepad adds .txt to the end and you get
module-0.md.txt, which is not the file you meant and which Windows will hide
the end of. If the next lesson can't find your file, this is why.
TextEdit on macOS: choose Format > Make Plain Text first. TextEdit starts new documents in rich text. If you don't switch it, you save a file that only looks like what you typed. The menu item is a toggle, so once you have switched it the menu reads "Make Rich Text" instead, and that is how you know plain text is on.
Keep the file next to your original notes. In the next lesson it gets a proper home.