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popular.Whilenotacomprehensivelookateithertool,itwillbeenoughtogetyou

started.

Whichpreprocessortochoosedependsonwhichsyntax,tools,environment,and

workflowyouprefer.Asidefrominstallationandcompilation,thebasicfeaturesof

LessandSassaresimilarenoughthatwe’lldiscusstheminparallel.Foramore

detailedexplorationofLessandSass,consultthedocumentationforeach.

Installing Less

Lessisavailableas:

■ aNode.js-basedtool,installablefromitspackagemanagernpm

■ atoolforRhino^3 ,Mozilla’sJava-basedJavaScriptengine

■ abrowser-basedtool

■ partofGUI-basedtoolssuchasKoala^4 ,Harp^5 ,andCodeKit^6

■ aclient-sideJavaScriptapplication

InstructionsforhowtousethefirstthreearecoveredontheLesswebsite.^7 We’ll

focusontheNode.js-basedtool.Itrustyou’veinstalledNodeandNPMafterreading

Chapter 2 .InstallingLessworksthesamewayasinstallingotherNPM-distributed

packages:

npm install -g less

LinuxandOSXusersmayneedtousesudo.Ifthecommandlinescaresyou,using

aGUI-basedtoolisperfectlyfine.YoucansafelyskipaheadtotheRulesetNesting

section.

Using Less from the Command Line

TousethecommandlineversionofLess,runlesscinaterminalwindow:

(^3) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Rhino
(^4) http://koala-app.com
(^5) http://harpjs.com/
(^6) https://incident57.com/codekit/
(^7) http://lesscss.org/
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