Instant LESS CSS Preprocessor How-to

by Alex Libby

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.

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

Who this book is for

This book is ideal for those new to using CSS Preprocessors such as LESS, and who are looking to get a good grounding in how to use LESS. It’s assumed you will have some experience in using HTML and CSS already; it is likely you will be responsible for maintaining at least one website (the larger the better), and are keen to learn how you can use LESS to help make it easier to manage your CSS styles. Although this book does incorporate some additional code using Modernizr, it is not essential to have had any previous experience with Modernizr.

82 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Arun Mahendrakar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gives the most comprehensive idea about LESS pre-processor for CSS. The examples given in the book are quite easy to grasp and implement in your projects.

The features and abilities that LESS provides allow you to significantly reduce the amount of CSS code you will have to write.

In the first couple of chapters the author provides a few tools to show how you can pre-compile your LESS to convert to CSS before deploying to production. Visual Studio developers can use this information in their build events to get LESS converted to CSS on each build.

I also liked the fact that the author marks each section as 'Should know', 'Must know' and 'Become an expert'. It helps me to see which sections I need to quickly glance through if I use this book as a reference guide for LESS.

There are a few typos in the code sample that you need to be aware of. The most common one is the declaration of .less file in the html. The book suggests the declaration to be:


But in the samples have it as:


Seems a bit inconsistent, that's all.