The goal of this quick homework is to learn a little bit about Markdown prior to our lesson on reproducible research. All you really need to know is that Markdown is a lightweight markup language that lets you create styled text (like bold, italics, links, etc.) using a very lightweight plain-text syntax. The resulting text file can be rendered into many downstream formats, like PDF (for printing) or HTML (websites).

  1. (30 seconds) Read the summary paragraph on the Wikipedia page.
  2. (5-10 minutes) Run through this in-browser markdown tutorial: http://markdowntutorial.com/.
  3. (5-10 minutes) Go to http://dillinger.io/, an in-browser Markdown editor, and play around. Write a simple markdown document, and export it to HTML and/or PDF.
  4. (5-10 minutes) Take a look at the Markdown/Rmarkdown reference for this course: http://bioconnector.org/markdown. Scroll through the Markdown reference, which you’ve already seen by this point, then click the RMarkdown link at the top and skim through this.
  5. (0 seconds) No need to look now, but don’t forget that the course help page has some useful resources on Markdown+RMarkdown.
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