Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

CSS

How important is Sass?

I am near the end of the 'how to build a website' track and everything is going great .....until tonight. The Sass is a very well presented course but I have had so much trouble knowing if the Ruby I downloaded is even compatible with my pc or even if what I have downloaded is actually what I need. It has curve balled me to be honest and I just feel like skipping through it and winging the quiz/challenges. How important is it?????

2 Answers

"How important is it" is kind of an ambiguous question... or at least its answer is ambiguous ... one of the two. Sass is a tool that, like any other tool, will make your life easier once you get the hang of it. It's definitely not necessary and it has a learning curve, but it will facilitate a lot of mundane tasks that you'll otherwise find yourself getting frustrated with (like repeat CSS declarations), not to mention the superpowers available to you in the form of mixins and @extend functionality etc.

So... it's important ... but it's also not a prerequisite to mastering CSS — there's no reason why you can't skip it for now and come back to it later :)

Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall
32,861 Points

Good answer! I'd also like to add that the "importance" of knowing Sass also depends on your career choice. If you want to get a job as a front-end developer, employers will want you to have experience using a CSS preprocessor such as Sass or LESS.

If you're just learning CSS so you can customize a WordPress theme, for example, then knowing a CSS preprocessor is not going to be very important in that context.

Agreed

Alexander Smith
Alexander Smith
2,769 Points

It's not important really. It's a development tool to help you save time. In the end it puts out regular CSS. However it's becoming ever more popular because of it's power. There is even speculation that eventually future versions of CSS will take a lot of its ideas.