Book Image

Mastering Sass

By : Luke Watts
Book Image

Mastering Sass

By: Luke Watts

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Sass
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Maps


Maps in Sass are like associative arrays in PHP, dictionaries in Python, and hashes in Ruby. If you're familiar with any of these data types, then you'll understand what a map in Sass is.

Essentially, a map is a set of unordered key/value (or name/value) pairs. The key is a string that holds a value that can be any data type; a string, integer, Boolean, list, or even another map.

Maps look a lot like nested lists in Sass, however they use a descriptive name which actually holds the value. The value is (usually) the part we're really interested in, however the descriptive keys allow you to explain what that value is, or what its purpose is.

Take the following list, which we may have used for our media mixin previously (if we didn't have maps):

$breakpoints: ( 
  (small 480px), 
  (medium 768px), 
  (large 980px) 
); 

What we're doing here is technically abusing a list. Here, we're using the first index of each nested list (small, medium, large) to name the second...