Beginning css preprocessors

Chapter 2

Introduction to Sass

In the previous chapter, you learned about precompilers, including why to use them, which ones are the 

known preprocessors, and their features. This chapter covers one of the most popular preprocessors: Sass.

In this chapter, you explore the following aspects of Sass:

•  Installation

•  Running the code

•  Variables

•  Comments

•  Data types

•  Parentheses

•  Nested rules

•  Nested properties

•  Referencing parent selector

•  Interpolation

•  Placeholder selector

•  Logical and control directives

Installing Sass

You install Sass via a Ruby gem, so you need to have Ruby installed on your machine. If you are on Mac  

OS X, you already have Ruby installed. If you are on Windows or Linux, you need to download and install 

Ruby from 

http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/

.

After installing Ruby, you install Sass by running the gem command. gem can be thought of as an 

extension that extends the functionality of applications that consume Ruby. You can install Sass via the 

command line using the command shown in Listing 

2-1

. A simple interpretation of this command is “Ruby, 

install the gem called sass”.