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

Chapter 4. Avoid Reinventing the Wheel

In the preceding chapters, you learned how to use Less to compile your CSS. Less helps you create reusable and maintainable CSS code. You have learned how to organize your files and the previous chapter also showed you the role of namespaces to make your code portable. Less helps you write efficient code to handle browser incompatibility. Less doesn't solve problems with browser incompatibility on its own but makes your solutions reusable, although the reusable mixins can still be complex for this reason. In this chapter, you will learn that you won't have to write all this complex code yourself. There are some libraries of prebuilt mixins out there which can help you work faster and create more stable code.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Background gradients

  • Preventing unused code

  • Testing your code

  • The iconic fonts of prebuilt mixins

  • Retina.js