I use Markdown style writing to keep notes on my computer and iPhone. It helps keep me sane in how I record show notes for podcasts and when I'm writing draft posts for this blog and others.

I keep meaning to record a screencast and write a blog post with details on how and why I use Markdown - but until that time I wanted to point people to Ryan Irelan's excellent screencast titled The Basics of Markdown.

For only $9 you will learn how to:

Create portable, styled documents with Markdown, a simple-to-use markup language for web writing and more. In this 33 minute video, learn the syntax and the tools you can use to create beautiful Markdown documents.

Ryan's a really-smart-guy™ who's also a great teacher and when he's not helping keep the cogs happy at Happy Cog he also publishes video training materials at Mijingo.

I recently watched his free video on using Soulver to create budgets - which is still on sale in the App Store I believe - and very quickly understood the app and could tell it'd be worth picking up.