Instant SASS CSS How-to

Learn to write more efficient CSS with the help of the SASS CSS library using practical, hands-on recipes

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
• Learn how to download and install SASS and compile SASS code to validate CSS
• Learn how to use the various elements of SASS, such as mixins, variables, control directives, and functions to create valid CSS
• Use an external mixin library such as Compass with SASS to produce exciting effects and learn to create your own mixin library

In Detail

CSS styling has been a key part of developing for the Internet since the early 1990s, but unlike JavaScript, has suffered from the inability to produce dynamic styles, using functions, operators, and variables. SASS uses the power of Ruby to bring support for all three and more to your CSS, allowing you to engage in a more efficient, modular style of working, and making it easier to maintain your CSS styling in your projects.

Instant SASS CSS How-to is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the power of SASS, and give you a good grounding in writing and compiling CSS style sheets using the SASS pre-processor language.

This book looks at how you can incorporate SASS into your web pages, and either produce style sheets dynamically, or pre-compile them before including the final article into your site’s pages.

You will also learn how you can use the power of mixins, functions, and variables to help produce style sheets, and reduce the amount of code you need to write in your style sheets. We will also take a look at how you can incorporate a more modular style to your development workflow, which will help with making style sheets more manageable and easier to update in the future. We will also take a look at how you can build up libraries of reusable code that you can incorporate into your future projects.

You will learn everything you need to know to start using SASS to help produce more efficient style sheets in your site’s pages, and adopt a more modular development workflow, which will make it easier to maintain your sites in the future.

What you will learn from this book

• Installing and using SASS in your site
• Compiling SASS code to produce valid CSS that you can use in your site’s pages
• Using variables, functions, mixins, control, and CSS-3 directives and operators in your SASS code
• Viewing SASS code in your browser
• Employing external mixin libraries such as Compass to add extra functionality to SASS
• Using SASS and Compass within CMS environments such as Wordpress
• Creating, importing, or using existing pre-built mixin libraries in your projects
• Altering your CSS output style in SASS, depending on your requirements

Approach

Filled with practical, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for the most important and useful tasks. Get the job done and learn as you go. This book is filled with practical, hands-on recipes to help you write SASS quickly and more efficiently.

Alex Libby

Alex Libby has plenty of experience in IT support, and he has been involved in supporting end users for the last 15 years in a variety of different environments, and currently works as a Technical Analyst, supporting a medium-sized SharePoint estate for an international parts distributor based in the UK. Although Alex gets to play with different technologies in his day job, his first true love has always been the open source movement, and in particular experimenting with CSS/CSS3 and HTML5. To date, Alex has written three books (one on HTML5 Video, one on SASS CSS, and another on JQuery Tools). LESS CSS Preprocessor How-to is his fourth book.