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

Variables


Variables in Sass are not an advanced topic. They're one of the first things we start using in Sass. However, there are a few things you should understand about variables in Sass which are different to other languages. These include the !default flag and also how Sass handles scope.

!default

When you work on any medium-to large-sized Sass project you will want to make your project configurable from one place. The easiest way to achieve this is with well-made mixins and functions and, of course, variables.

Working on large projects can leave you with dozens and dozens of variables ranging from colors to padding, margins, font families, and font sizes. These might be used throughout your project or they may only need a few files (or one file). Some of these variables might only be used in one or two mixins or functions; however, these mixins and functions will need those variables in order to work.

This is where the !default flag is extremely useful. While working on a project you will...