There's a lot of misinformation in this thread. First of all, recent versions of SASS include support for SCSS syntax, which means you can basically start with

There's a lot of misinformation in this thread. First of all, recent versions of SASS include support for SCSS syntax, which means you can basically start with plain old CSS and learn to use variables, mixins, nesting, etc from there. Second, learning SASS syntax is not at all difficult. It's exactly like CSS, except without curly braces and semicolons, and it's whitespace sensitive. I find this results in much more readable code, and is much faster to write than standard CSS. In fact, writing regular CSS now feels like a chore, so I've started using Staticmatic (which supports HAML/SASS) when I want to do quick static prototypes.