Mastering Sass

Key Features

• Create data-intensive, highly scalable apps using Sass and COMPASS
• Master the concepts of Sass and COMPASS and unleash your potential to develop enterprise-grade apps
• This book is an experts’ guide on leveraging Sass and COMPASS features

Book Description

CSS and Sass add elegance and excellence to the basic language, and consist of a CSS-compatible syntax that allows you to use variables, nested rules, mixins, inline imports, and much more.

This book will start with an overview of the features in Sass and Compass, most of which you’ll already be familiar; however, this will ensure you know what’s expected as the book goes deeper into Sass and Compass. Next you will learn CSS and HTML concepts that are vital to a good Sass workflow. After all, Sass exists to simplify writing CSS, but it won’t teach you how to make clean, scalable, reusable CSS. For that, you need to understand some basic concepts of OOCSS, SMACCS, and Atomic Design.

Once you’ve brushed up on the important concepts, it’s time to write some Sass. Mainly you’ll write a few functions and mixins that really leverage control flow using @if / @else loops and you’ll learn how to figure out when and why things are going wrong before they bring you to a stop. Moving further, you’ll learn how to use @debug, @warn and @error to properly handle errors.

You’ll also learn about Gulp and how to use it to automate your workflow and reduce your repetitive tasks. And finally you’ll learn about sourcemaps. With sourcemaps, you’ll be able to write, debug, and view your Sass and Compass all from within the browser. It’ll even LiveReload too!

As a bonus, you’ll take a look at that funky Flexbox, currently all the rage! You’ll learn how powerful and flexible it really is, and how you can use it with Compass. Best of all, it falls back very gracefully indeed! In fact, you’ll be able to apply it to any existing project without having to change a line of the original CSS.

What you will learn

• Master Sass and Compass features
• Familiarize yourself with CSS and HTML concepts that are vital for a good Sass workflow.
• Build real-world websites focusing on layouts and content aspects
• Work on a grid system using Compass and Susy
• Automate your workflow with Gulp
• Write functions and mixins to leverage the control flow

About the Author

Luke Watts is a web developer and digital artist from Galway, Ireland. He started learning web design in 2012 after many years working with AutoCAD in the manufacturing industry. In 2014 he set up his own web development agency called Affinity4 (http://affinity4.ie) in Galway, Ireland. He is an Oracle Certified MySQL Developer, and an Adobe Certified Associate (Photoshop and Dreamweaver).

Luke has a keen interest in learning and teaching others. He has written articles for many websites, including his own blog, on a wide range of subjects such as SEO, WordPress Development, SVG, Sass, Jade, OOP, Git, Silex, MySQL, and PHP.

Luke is also an accomplished artist, both in traditional mediums (mostly pencil and ink) and in digital painting. When not building websites or writing code he will most likely be working on a digital painting on his Wacom tablet using Photoshop or creating a 3D model or scene in any number of 3D modeling applications.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Requirements
Chapter 2. Sass – The Road to Better CSS
Chapter 3. Compass – Navigating with Compass
Chapter 4. CSS and HTML – SMACSS, OOCSS and Semantics
Chapter 5. Advanced Sass
Chapter 6. Gulp – Automating Tasks for a Faster Workflow
Chapter 7. Sourcemaps – Editing and Saving in the Browser
Chapter 8. Building a Content-Rich Website Components
Chapter 9. Building a Content-Rich Website – Layout
Chapter 10. Building a Content-Rich Website – Theme