A few months ago, we started using the Sass preprocessor to help make our projects easier to manage. I wish we’d had Dan Cederholm’s excellent, just released Sass for Web Designers before we did. (Quick note: the good people at A Book Apart sent us a copy last week so, yes, we’ve had a chance to actually read it).

Sass for Web Designers, the 10th in A Book Apart’s series for web professionals, continues the tradition of being the Seal Team 6 of technical books. It gets you in, gets the job done, and gets you out, without anyone knowing you were even there (stealth helicopter not included). It’s a quick, approachable read and Dan makes what could be a thorny, dense topic easy to understand.

The book starts with a chapter asking “Why Sass?”, which you may be tempted to skip if you’re already excited about CSS preprocessing (I mean, who isn’t!). Resist this urge because even if you know why Sass is great, you’ll likely need to convince a client or someone else on your team, and Dan makes a great argument for you. Borrow from it liberally.

Because Sass involves a bit of one-time setup before you can get started, there’s a chapter dedicated to setup and workflow. For designers not accustomed to the command line, this is essential reading and Dan makes it simple, for both Mac and Windows. He also details several desktop apps that will make setting up Sass even easier, though he left out my personal favorite, Hammer for Mac, probably because Hammer does more than just compile Sass files.

Next, Dan gives an overview of actually using Sass, which will be the chapter you return to the most. Instead of getting into the minutiae of every single feature of Sass, Dan provides a detailed look at the parts you’ll likely use most: nesting, variables, mixins, import, and extend. It’s an excellent overview and covers everything you’ll need to really make effective use of Sass in your projects. Keep in mind that Sass has a lot of advanced, programming-like functionality (if statements, loops, functions, etc.) that Dan (wisely, I believe) chooses not to cover for the sake of keeping the scope of the book compact. Fortunately, the Sass documentation is quite good.

The final chapter is dedicated to using Sass for responsive design, specifically media queries. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book. At Mule, we’ve been using a similar approach in order to make our stylesheets more modular and it has made our work much easier to build, maintain, and, dare I say, more fun.

I can’t recommend this book more highly to anyone who’s interested in writing better, easier-to-maintain CSS. If you’ve been reluctant to use a preprocessor, Sass for Web Designers will set you along the right path.