Programming Skills for Data Science: Start Writing Code to Wrangle, Analyze, and Visualize Data with R, First Edition

4Using Markdown for Documentation

As a data scientist, you will often encounter the somewhat trivial task of adding formatting to plain text (e.g., making it bold or italic) without the use of a program like Microsoft Word. This chapter introduces Markdown, a simple programming syntax that can be used to describe text formatting and structure by adding special characters to the text. Being comfortable with this simple syntax to describe text rendering will help you document your code, and post well-formatted messages to question forums (such as StackOverflow¹) or chat applications (such as Slack²), as well as create clear documentation that describes your code’s purpose when hosted on GitHub (called the “README” file). In this chapter, you will ...