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

Chapter 6. Gulp – Automating Tasks for a Faster Workflow

From this point onwards, almost everything we do will be for our actual project. We'll be creating the homepage for a busy, content-rich website. Content-rich like a blog, a news website, or a tutorials website. We'll write mixins and functions which will be used throughout our project. Some of these will simply be for small design elements and others will be for large components, or features such as media queries and a custom built grid system.

However, before we get to actually writing code for our project we're going to look at removing and automating the repetitive tasks. Think about how many times we've had to run compass compile, or the sass --watch commands. Then we need to switch to our browser and hit F5 or click Refresh to see the changes. Then we jump to our editor and make some changes and repeat.

So, in this chapter we'll focus on setting up our project to use GulpJS to make our task easier and less repetitive from this...