Sass and Compass for Designers

If you know HTML and CSS, then you can have all the power of Sass and Compass at your disposal. This step-by-step guide will take you through the time-saving features that makes it so much easier to create cross-browser CSS.

Overview

• Simple, clear, and thorough. This book ensures you don’t need to be a programming mastermind to wield the power of Sass and Compass!
• Previously tricky and time-consuming CSS tasks will become trivial. Easily produce cross-browser CSS3 gradients, shadows, and transformations along with image sprites, data URIs, and more.
• Follow along with installing, setting up, and working through an entire project, implementing the Sass and Compass techniques and tools as we go.

In Detail

The CSS preprocessor, Sass, is becoming the de-facto standard for producing cross-browser CSS more maintainable and with more ease. It supercharges CSS with features that make previously difficult and time-consuming tasks trivial. This book concentrates on distilling the techniques in a straightforward manner making it accessible to all, even to those that only know HTML and CSS.

Written by the author of the bestselling "Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3", Sass and Compass for Designers will explain everything you need to get Sass and Compass installed, mastered, and making your life easier. There will be no perplexing terminology or baffling syntax left unexplained. We'll get you set up and then build a site together, step by step, using the incredible power of Sass and Compass.

We will start with a completely unstyled HTML document and build a responsive Sass and Compass powered website step by step.

Sass and Compass make CSS easy. You'll learn how to manipulate color in the stylesheet with a single command, create responsive grids with ease, automatically create image sprites, and create CSS3 powered rules that work across all modern browsers.

"Sass and Compass for Designers" explains how to produce great CSS easier than ever before.

What you will learn from this book

• Install Sass and Compass on your system and then set up and maintain Sass and Compass powered projects!
• Learn how to easily manipulate colors; tinting, shading, mixing, and complementing existing colors in your stylesheets becomes a cinch.
• Make your own responsive CSS-based layout grid that scales across any viewport with no extra markup needed.
• Create media query-based CSS rules alongside existing styles, making responsive website building simpler.
• Explore Compass’s many helpers and tools. You’ll learn to embed images and fonts and produce advanced cross-browser CSS3.
• Create perfect image sprites with Compass in moments.
• Learn how to create loops with Sass to automate repetitive CSS tasks.
• Understand how to compartmentalize code, making your CSS more maintainable, understandable, and modular than ever before.

Approach

A step-by-step tutorial guide, taking you through how to build a responsive Sass and Compass powered website.

Who this book is written for

If you understand HTML and CSS, this book is all you need to take your code to the next level with Sass and Compass. No prior understanding of CSS preprocessors or programming conventions is needed.

Ben Frain

Ben Frain has been a frontend web designer and developer since 1996. He also works as a technology journalist, contributing regularly to a number of diverse publications on the Mac platform, consumer technology, website design, and the aviation industry.

Before that, he worked as an underrated (and modest) TV actor, having graduated from Salford University with a degree in Media and Performance. He has written four equally underrated (his opinion) screenplays and still harbors the (fading) belief he might sell one. Outside of work he enjoys simple pleasures; playing indoor football whilst his body (and wife) still allows it, and wrestling with his son.

Visit him online at http://www.benfrain.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/benfrain.