Book Image

LESS WEB DEVELOPMENT ESSENTIALS

By : Bass Jobsen
Book Image

LESS WEB DEVELOPMENT ESSENTIALS

By: Bass Jobsen

Overview of this book

Less is a CSS preprocessor that essentially improves the functionality of simple CSS with the addition of several features. The book begins by teaching you how Less facilitates the process of web development. You will quickly then move on to actually creating your first layout using Less and compiling your very first Less code. Next, you will learn about variables and mixins and how they will help in building robust CSS code. In addition, you'll learn how to keep your code clean and test it by using style guides. We will then move on to the concept of Bootstrapping and the strength of using Less with Twitter Bootstrap. Going one step further, you will be able to customize Twitter's Bootstrap 3 using Less. Finally, you will learn how to integrate Less into your WordPress themes and explore other web apps that use Less. By leveraging this powerful CSS preprocessor, you will be able to consistently produce amazing web applications while making CSS code development an enjoyable experience.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Less Web Development Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mixins


Mixins play an important role in Less. You saw mixins in the first chapter when the rounded-corners example was discussed. Mixins take their naming from object-oriented programming. They look like functions in functional programming but in fact act like C macros. Mixins in Less allow you to embed all the properties of a class into another class by simply including the class name as one of its properties, as shown in the following code:

.mixin(){
  color: red;
      width: 300px;
  padding: 0 5px 10px 5px;
}
p{
.mixin();
}

The preceding code will get compiled into the following code:

p{
  color: red;
  width: 300px;
  padding: 0 5px 10px 5px;
}

In the final CSS code used on the website, every <p> paragraph tag will be styled with the properties defined in the mixin() function. The advantage will be that you can apply the same mixin on different classes. As seen in the rounded-corners example, you only have to declare the properties once.

Try opening less/mixins.less from the available...