In this chapter, we have looked at a few reasons to use Sass and Compass. We have also considered exactly what each is, does, and how the two relate to one another.

Then we've either installed Sass and Compass from the command line (and wrapped our heads around what Ruby gems are) or opted to use any one of the growing number of graphical tools that support Sass and Compass. Either way, we now have some mechanism in place to watch our Sass files and automatically create CSS files whenever they are saved.

Hopefully one of the biggest hurdles, getting Sass and Compass set up, is now dealt with. We can now get on with starting our first Sass and Compass project. That is exactly what we will be doing in the next chapter. We will learn all about how to amend the configuration file, the various ways we can comment Sass files, make use of partial files, and use variables for cleaner and more maintainable style sheet authoring.