Here's Multimarkdown:
http://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-5/. I'd start with Multimarkdown because it has more features. MMD is a superset of Markdown.
If you would be so kind, be sure to output XHTML, not HTML, as XHTML is used to make EPUB books. XHTML tag reference:
http://www.webreference.com/xml/reference/xhtml.html.
Some variations on Markdown use CSS like this:
# header 1 {color:#c0c0c0; font-weight:bold;}
which is converted to XHTML:
<h1 style="color:#c0c0c0; font-weight:bold;">header 1</h1>
but I was unable to find a link for that, yet.
Online markdown editor here:
http://dillinger.io/. I don't know what flavor of Markdown they use. Another online MD editor:
http://markdownlivepreview.com/.
For reference, the Perl module to convert Markdown to XHTML:
https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::Markup.
Some people have talked about using a parse tree to convert MD to XHTML. I have never taken a class about parse trees. Is this a good method of converting MD to XHTML? Do you have a link for a beginner to learn how to use parse trees? I do not have the skill to make the component myself but I'd like to learn a bit about parsing.