CSS is often perceived as a simple language. In fact, while being declarative and apparently simple, it is pretty hard to maintain. For a growing large-scale web application, maintainability is crucial. This book is about ways to leverage known tricks and hacks, new CSS level 3 module techniques, preprocessors, and other tools to create really high-quality products. This will include examples on techniques such as float handling and component-based CSS.
Chapter 1, Foundations and Tools, is about the tools that will help you build better CSS code. It describes the features of preprocessors before providing foundational knowledge about SASS. In this chapter, you will get basic knowledge about automatization of repeatable processes in frontend development with GULP.js. You will also find an example of file structures, which you can use to divide a project into files that are small and easy to edit and maintain.
Chapter 2, Mastering of Fundamentals, helps you master the box model, floating CSS, positioning troubleshooting, and display types. After this chapter, you will be more aware of foundations of HTML and CSS.
Chapter 3, Mastering of Pseudoelements and Pseudoclasses, describes pseudoclasses and pseudoelements and how you can use them. It will cover the problem of drawing primitives and how to use them as a part of optimized CSS code.
Chapter 4, Responsive Websites – Prepare Your Code for Specific Devices, provides knowledge about RWD and how to prepare projects. It will cover problems of modern websites and optimization techniques.
Chapter 5, Using Background Images in CSS, addresses the fact that images are on almost every webpage. This chapter will teach you how to craft an optimal website with images displayed correctly on a wide spectrum of modern devices, including mobile phones and tablets.
Chapter 6, Styling Forms, teaches you about styling forms and which elements of CSS you can and cannot use.
Chapter 7, Resolving Classic Problems, is about troubleshooting classic problems in CSS: dealing with opacity, transforms, and centering elements.
Chapter 8, Usage of Flexbox Transform, teaches you about new features of CSS and where to use them.
Chapter 9, Calc, Gradients, and Shadows, will provide information about calc function, which will help you with math operations in CSS. This chapter will reveal the gradient functions and how can you use them in HTML layouts. In this chapter, you will also get a basic knowledge about CSS shadows and its usage. After this chapter, you will know how to add shadow to boxes and texts.
Chapter 10, Don't Repeat Yourself – Let's Create a Simple CSS Framework, is about building reusable code and how to later use it as a foundation for your own projects. This chapter will cover problems related to creating basic CSS frameworks.
Chapter 11, Mailers Fundamentals, is a short introduction to mailers and problems that can occur during the mailer building process. The chapter is focused on fundamental knowledge.
Chapter 12, Scalability and Modularity, teaches you how to prepare scalable code in CSS.
Chapter 13, Code Optimization, is about the final process that takes place after building CSS code. It's mainly about optimization and minification tools. It covers the problems involved in preparing your code before you start coding and during the creation of CSS code.
Chapter 14, Final Automatization and Processes Optimization, is about the automatization of operations over CSS code.
To use this book, it is recommended you install your favorite IDE, which should support the following:
HTML
SASS
CSS
For better understanding of the code and its debugging, you will need a browser such as:
Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Internet Explorer 9+
Additionally, you will need the following:
Ruby (to install SASS)
SASS
Node.js (to install Gulp.js)
Gulp.js
This book is meant for all frontend developers who want to learn how to use the features of CSS and SASS. The book covers a number of topics that can be interesting for developers at each level. If you are a beginner, it will introduce you to CSS and SASS. If you an intermediate/expert programmer, this book can be a good refresher of some CSS and SASS features. Additionally, the final chapter is for all developers who want to start working as a frontend developer and want to automatize a bunch of tasks such as the minification of CSS code.
In this book, you will find a number of tools. Mainly it will be SASS and CSS code but as you know CSS is not working by itself and we will be using basic HTML structures. Additionally there will be a bunch of JS code which will describe Gulp.js taks.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "With preprocessor, each @import makes a merging for you, and in this place you will have a content of mentioned file "
A block of code is set as follows:
@import "typography.css" @import "blocks.css" @import "main.css" @import "single.css"
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
npm init npm install gulp-compass gulp --save-dev
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The easiest way to invoke inspector is to right-click on an element and choose Inspect ."
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