Sass in the Real World: Book I of IV
In our lives, whenever we encounter a great experience whether it be a great movie or a great vacation location or a great technology toolset, our desire is to share it with everyone we encounter. That is how we feel about Sass CSS and that is why we decided to write a book about it. There have been plenty of introductory books on Sass, however we felt that our field was missing a more advanced book on Sass, a book that goes beyond the basics of Sass and CSS and lays the proper groundwork for starting a CSS project with Sass.
We are very excited to take this journey and hope that you will join us and share this experience with us.
-- Kianosh Pourian and Dale Sande
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.
- We are using a command line interface to run all of our Sass development. However if you want to use some applications like Codekit, Compass.app, Scout, or any other development application, please feel free.
- 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.