Sass in the Real World: Book II of IV
In the first book of our series, we told you about our excitement for Sass CSS, the technology behind it and how it can help us in CSS development. In the second book of our series, we continue on the journey through the world of Sass development and we will pick up from where we left off.
We started with the history of Sass, then file management, Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS), scope management, and ended with mixins. These are rules and guidelines that we follow when starting any development project involving Sass. Now with the second part of the series, we will dive deeper into Sass development by learning about:
- Functions: built-in Sass functions and also custom build your own functions
- Control directives: @if, @for, @each, and @while directives
- Working with lists and maps
We appreciate you joining us for this part of the journey and hope that this part of the series is also useful and informative to you.
-- Kianosh Pourian and Dale Sande
Early release book
Writing a book is hard and takes time. So how do we get this new awesome to you as fast as possible? The answer, EARLY RELEASE BOOK! In this EARLY RELEASE BOOK, read chapter-by-chapter while it's being written and, when finished, you get the final book.
The best part is, when you buy the book you are entitled to FREE UPDATES FOR LIFE! Our friends at GitBook.io have made it easy for us to quickly notify you when ever we publish an updated version of the book. It's like WIN all over the place!
About the book and series
Our initial goal of writing this book was to fill a void in Sass CSS books which is a book that covered beyond the basics of Sass CSS development. To fulfill this goal, our initial approach is to provide a single book that covered the A to Z of professional Sass CSS development. While this goal has not changed, our approach has made a small "pivot" (word du jour in today's technology world).
We have divided our single book approach into a 4 part book series. This was done to achieve several goals:
- Be able to publish a book quicker and bringing it into the market faster
- Allow users to select the desired part of the series without having to purchase the entire series. This was a very important part of our approach, as we have seen that different developers are at different levels of Sass CSS learning and development. This will give all a chance to fill in the gaps as needed.
The four part series consist of the following parts:
- Part 1: Getting Started with Sass. This part of the series concentrates on the basics of Sass development however with a deeper context and history behind all that is Sass. Our goal for this part of the series was to not only review the basics but also present an explanation behind all the decisions that was made and decisions that a developer must consider and make when developing with Sass
- Part 2: Deeper Dive. A continuation of our philosophy on not only understanding why certain structure has been built but also the deeper underlying structure behind it. In this part of the series, we have taken a deper dive into functions (both out-of-the-box functions and custom functions), when to use functions vs. mixins and other tools and processes that accompany Sass CSS development.
- Part 3: Getting Really Sass'y. In this part of the series, we continue with all the development needs by talking about issues like responsive design, testing, debugging, and working with frameworks like Zurb Foundation or Twitter Bootstrap. We will also talk a bit about Compass, the Sass framework that can be accompnied with Sass CSS development.
- Part 4: Sass in the Stack. We end the book series with the implementation of Sass in different technology stacks like NodeJS implementation or the Rails asset pipeline. We will also touch upon some performance issues and how to handle these issues.
We hope you enjoy these books, either through individual series or the entire four part series, and this will help you further in your Sass CSS development.
Assumptions
This is the part that most book will label as "Who is this book for?" but since we are very strict in our grammar and refuse to end a sentence in a preposition, we have called it "Assumptions", but the sentiment is the same. These are some of the assumptions that we are making:
- We assume that the reader is familiar with Sass CSS and has install Sass on their development machine. If you have not installed Sass CSS, it is very easy, go to Sass-lang.com.
- Running Sass from the command line is preferred, however feel free to use some like Codekit, Compass.app, Scout, or any other desktop application of your choice.
- For testing of new ideas and experimenting with different versions and/or Sass libraries, we suggest using SassMeister, the leading on-line Sass utility.
- Although we are very opinionated about some of our approaches in Sass CSS development, we are agnostic to the technology stack that is being used and promote the usage of Sass in any environment that is suitable and will meet your needs.
So let's start learning about Sass CSS and develop CSS with its' rightful accompanying tool.