front matter
One of the hard parts of learning a new language or skill is extrapolating the individual skills learned into the thing we’re trying to build. Although we may know the mechanics of grid or understand how flex works, learning which to choose and when (or how) to achieve a specific end that we’re envisioning can be challenging. Rather than start with the theory and then apply it to our projects, in this book we took the opposite approach. We started with the project and then looked at which skills and techniques are necessary to achieve our end.
But why talk about CSS? We can write an entire application using nothing but browser-provided defaults, but it wouldn’t have much personality, now, would it? With CSS, we can achieve a lot for both our users and our business needs. For everything from brand recognition to guiding users with consistent styles and design paradigms to making the project eye-catching, CSS is an important tool in our toolbox.
Regardless of libraries, preprocessors, or frameworks, the underlying technology that drives how our applications and websites look is CSS. With that in mind, so as not to get sidetracked by the individual quirks and functionality of libraries and frameworks, we chose to go back to the basics, writing this book in plain old vanilla CSS because, if we understand CSS, applying it to any other tech stack or environment becomes much easier down the line.