4 ms·

As a backend dev, I wish somebody had told me this exact advice earlier on in my career. CSS does have a fair amount of silly legacy shit, but it's really not a

by peller 10y ago

As a backend dev, I wish somebody had told me this exact advice earlier on in my career. CSS does have a fair amount of silly legacy shit, but it's really not all that bad once you dive in. Another good project's source code to learn from is Skeleton. (more simple than bootstrap) CSS version: https://github.com/dhg/Skeleton https://github.com/dhg/Skeleton Sass version: https://github.com/WhatsNewSaes/Skeleton-Sass https://github.com/WhatsNewSaes/Skeleton-Sass Edit: For more of a tutorial approach, check out http://learn.shayhowe.com/html-css/ http://learn.shayhowe.com/html-css/

kelnos 10y ago
I'm a backend dev who did a little frontend here and there over a decade ago (and has sorta kept up since then out of curiosity). So I know CSS decently well, but still need to look things up here and there, and I certainly don't know all the bleeding-edge stuff. So yes, you should learn CSS, at least so you understand how web technologies work, in general. But not learning/using Bootstrap (as the parent recommends), if you think that will make your life easier, seems silly. I recently had to do a couple frontend projects for the first time in said over-a-decade-ago, and I found Bootstrap easy to pick up (it took like a half hour), and made things a lot easier than rolling my own CSS, for very little cost. To actually answer the OP's question, it depends on what you need to do. If you're starting new projects, just learn BS4. I did that back in February, and it worked out well for me. If you have to deal with some existing projects that use BS3, you'll of course need to learn that. But they're so easy to use, that if you already understand how HTML and CSS work (if you don't, of course that should be your step 1), you don't need to really "learn" it so much as read through the section on the layout model, and start building a page/site/app, looking at the reference docs as you go along when you want to add a dropdown or navbar or something.
dwaltrip 10y ago
A great resource for digging into the nitty gritty fundamentals of layout (the hardest part of CSS, in my mind): http://book.mixu.net/css/ http://book.mixu.net/css/ I came across this when I was looking to gain a more complete mental model of how CSS layout works, as opposed to to the odd assortment of tricks, approaches, and googling I had been relying thus far.
- ucacian 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing it. It looks pretty solid.
- afarrell 10y ago
  Holy shit. I've been looking for something like this for half a decade.
magic_beans 10y ago
I use skeleton for all my projects. It's light, highly customizable, and a breeze to use.
FrancoDiaz 10y ago
Good stuff. I did notice that the normalize.css of Skeleton hadn't been updated since 2014. Is there a more update version of "normalize" out there, or is it still pretty much apropos today?
- peller 10y ago
  Yea there have been updates to it, I dunno why they included it like that. What I do is use a forked version of Skeleton-Sass and include normalize.css as a dependency, so that npm always pulls down the latest version. The changes to normalize are listed here (Skeleton includes v3.0.2): https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/CHANGEL...

by peller 10y ago

kelnos 10y ago

I'm a backend dev who did a little frontend here and there over a decade ago (and has sorta kept up since then out of curiosity). So I know CSS decently well, but still need to look things up here and there, and I certainly don't know all the bleeding-edge stuff. So yes, you should learn CSS, at least so you understand how web technologies work, in general. But not learning/using Bootstrap (as the parent recommends), if you think that will make your life easier, seems silly. I recently had to do a couple frontend projects for the first time in said over-a-decade-ago, and I found Bootstrap easy to pick up (it took like a half hour), and made things a lot easier than rolling my own CSS, for very little cost. To actually answer the OP's question, it depends on what you need to do. If you're starting new projects, just learn BS4. I did that back in February, and it worked out well for me. If you have to deal with some existing projects that use BS3, you'll of course need to learn that. But they're so easy to use, that if you already understand how HTML and CSS work (if you don't, of course that should be your step 1), you don't need to really "learn" it so much as read through the section on the layout model, and start building a page/site/app, looking at the reference docs as you go along when you want to add a dropdown or navbar or something.

dwaltrip 10y ago

A great resource for digging into the nitty gritty fundamentals of layout (the hardest part of CSS, in my mind): http://book.mixu.net/css/ http://book.mixu.net/css/ I came across this when I was looking to gain a more complete mental model of how CSS layout works, as opposed to to the odd assortment of tricks, approaches, and googling I had been relying thus far.

ucacian 10y ago
Thanks for sharing it. It looks pretty solid.
afarrell 10y ago
Holy shit. I've been looking for something like this for half a decade.

magic_beans 10y ago

I use skeleton for all my projects. It's light, highly customizable, and a breeze to use.

FrancoDiaz 10y ago

Good stuff. I did notice that the normalize.css of Skeleton hadn't been updated since 2014. Is there a more update version of "normalize" out there, or is it still pretty much apropos today?

peller 10y ago
Yea there have been updates to it, I dunno why they included it like that. What I do is use a forked version of Skeleton-Sass and include normalize.css as a dependency, so that npm always pulls down the latest version. The changes to normalize are listed here (Skeleton includes v3.0.2): https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/CHANGEL...