Instant LESS CSS Preprocessor How-to

Practical, hands-on recipes to write more efficient CSS, with the help of the LESS CSS Preprocessor library

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
• Use mixins, functions, and variables to dynamically auto-generate styles, based on minimal existing values.
• Use the power of LESS to produce style sheets dynamically, or incorporate precompiled versions into your code.
• Learn how to use existing mixin libraries, or to create your own that you can reuse in future projects

In Detail

CSS styling has been a key part of developing for the Internet since the early 1990s, but unlike JavaScript, has suffered from the inability to produce dynamic styles using functions, operators, and variables. LESS brings the power of all three and more to your CSS, allowing you to engage a more efficient, modular style of working, and making it easier to maintain your CSS styling in your projects.

Instant LESS CSS Preprocessor How-To is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises to help you take advantage of the power of LESS, and give you a good grounding in writing and compiling CSS style sheets using the LESS Preprocessor language.

This book looks at how you can incorporate LESS into your web pages, and either produce style sheets dynamically, or pre-compile them before including the final article into your site’s pages.

You will also learn how you can use the power of mixins, functions, and variables to help produce style sheets, and reduce the amount of code you need to write in your style sheets. We will also take a look at how you can incorporate a more modular style to your development workflow, which will help with making style sheets more manageable and easier to update in the future. We will also take a look at how you can build up libraries of reusable code that you can incorporate into your future projects.

You will learn everything you need to know to start using LESS to help produce more efficient style sheets in your site’s pages, and adopt a more modular development workflow, which will make it easier to maintain your sites in the future.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and use LESS into your site.
• Produce dynamic style sheets, or precompiling and including the final articles into your site’s pages.
• Use variables, functions, mixins, and operators in your LESS code.
• Use JavaScript to produce styles in your LESS code.
• Use LESS with other libraries, such as Modernizr.
• Create, import or use existing pre-built mixin libraries in your projects.
• Use existing mixin libraries, or create your own, that you can reuse in future projects.
• Learn how to write more efficient CSS, using LESS.

Approach

Filled with practical, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for the most important and useful tasks. Get the job done and learn as you go. A how-To book with practical recipes accompanied with rich screenshots for easy comprehension.This book takes the How-to series approach to help you learn most important tasks through recipes