Chapter 4. Working with Variables, Mixins, and Functions

So far in this book, we've built up the basics of what will become our development toolkit for working with Less and taken a whistle-stop tour through some of the syntax and concepts that are associated with Less as a CSS preprocessor. I am sure some well-known actor once said in a film somewhere, "It's time...."

Yes, it's time to get stuck with using Less! However, hold on; this chapter says it's about working with variables, functions, and the like; surely, this means we're developing in programming code, right?

Wrong. Don't worry, my friends; granted, we will look at functions, but they are nothing like the functions you might see when developing using languages such as C# or Visual Basic. Indeed, the only similarity is the name—as we will see, functions within the world of Less are more akin to using a scientific calculator than complicated code.

This is just a small part of what we will cover. Throughout this chapter, we will look at some of the building blocks of Less, including:

• Creating and scoping variables
• Developing simple and parametric mixins
• Using Less functions
• Using prebuilt libraries

Intrigued? Let's get started...