Chapter 3. Getting Started with Less

In the first two chapters of this book, Chapter 1, Introducing Less, and Chapter 2, Building a Less Development Toolkit, we learned what Less is, some of its benefits, and the reasons why you should get to grips with a preprocessor that is rapidly gaining serious traction in the development world.

In this chapter, we're going to start by downloading and installing Less and then setting up our base project that we can reuse throughout this book, which is already set to our preferences. While it might seem a little mundane, it is nevertheless an essential part of working with Less! Once we have our base project ready, we will then delve into a whistle-stop tour of some of the main code features of Less, before looking at how you can compile your Less code into valid CSS and seeing the effects of any changes made to the Less code.

In this chapter, we will delve a little deeper into Less by covering the following topics:

• Incorporating Less into your website
• The dangers of using Less on the client side
• Exploring the syntax used by Less
• Creating some basic styles
• Compiling the code and viewing the results
• Altering the Less code and viewing the effects of changes

Ready? As they say in temperal mechanics, there's no time like the present to get started...!