“A minute to learn . . . A lifetime to master.” That phrase might feel a little trite these days, but I still like it. It was popularized in modern times by being the tagline for the board game Othello. In Othello, players take turns placing white or black pieces onto a grid. If, for example, a white piece is played trapping a row of black pieces between two white, all the black pieces are flipped and the row becomes entirely white.
Like Othello, it isn’t particularly hard to learn the rules of CSS. You write a selector that attempts to match elements, then you write key/value pairs that style those elements. Even folks just starting out don’t have much trouble figuring out that basic syntax. The trick to getting good at CSS, as in Othello, is knowing exactly when to do what.
CSS is one of the languages of the web, but it isn’t quite in the same wheelhouse as programming. CSS has little in the way of logic and loops. Math is limited to a single function. Only recently have variables become a possibility. Rarely do you need to consider security. CSS is closer to painting than Python. You’re free to do what you like with CSS. It won’t spit out any errors at you or fail to compile.