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

Operating on numbers, colors, and variables


Less has support for the basic arithmetic operations: addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*), and division (/). In the strict-math mode, operations should be placed between parentheses. You can apply an operation on variables, values, and numbers. These will help you make relationships between variables.

Open less/footer.less to immediately see the operation that you used, as in the following code, and its benefits:

footer {
  div {
    float: left;
  width: ((@basic-width / 3 ) - @footer-gutter);
  }
}

In the preceding code, the / sign (division) has been used to give the footer columns one-third of the available width (as set by @basic-width). Using operations in your code feels so natural that you may not have even realized you have been using them until now. Less uses normal order precedence, where you can add extra parentheses to explicitly set precedence and avoid confusion. For instance, in Less, 3 + 3 * 3 gives 12. So, (3 + 3)...