I've just taken my girlfriend through the same steps, html + css and then onto using middleman with less etc. She was using my 27inch imac which meant there was

I've just taken my girlfriend through the same steps, html + css and then onto using middleman with less etc. She was using my 27inch imac which meant there was plenty of room for chrome, sublime and a console. With livereload running it's a great environment for learning, you just tweak the html/css and then watch the page update. On a side note I'm finding that less/scss is great for smoothing over a few css bumps. There's quite a few mysterious encantations(columns, clearing floats etc) that you need to work with raw css but with less/scss you can just wrap them up as a mixin and tell them to use that.