Learn Alpine, Openapi and Scss

It's tempting to pick up a framework which has preselected flexbox or grid as the layout tool of choice, but it's important to learn when and why to use each method. This leads to slimmer stylesheets which results in better site performance, and less likelihood for "hacks" to make one method do what the other does inherently better. 

Throughout this collection, we will be progressively styling a responsive landing page template while building your knowledge on when to select grid or flexbox for any layout scenario. Spoiler alert: sometimes the best solution is using both!

The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent.

flexbox

Create a Landing Page with CSS Grid and Flexbox

Welcome to this beginner level series on Alpine JS! 👋🏞

Alpine JS is a rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behaviour in your markup. It brings declarative, reactive, data-driven nature of libraries like React or Vue to your HTML templates.

In this series, you will learn about Alpine's handy **directives**. You'll discover how to define a component scope with `x-data`, run code on mount with `x-init`, attach event listeners with `x-on`, display data with `x-text`, decide wether or not to show an element with `x-show`, iterate through data with `x-for`, retrieve a DOM element with `x-ref`, learn how to achieve _two-way data binding_ with `x-model`, and much more.

You'll also learn how **"modifiers"** can be applied and chained to directives to provide additional functionality: control the animation transition of entering and leaving DOM elements, debounce an event listener, etc.

We'll also touch on what Alpine calls **"magic properties"**, which give you access to native browser events (`$event`), reference to DOM elements (`$refs`), and more.

You'll gradually discover Alpine's API and syntax, from building simple tabs to a mini app that fetches a dog picture based on a "breed" search field. 🐶

**Get ready to breathe some fresh air** - it's time to walk into cool, green Alpine pastures! 🏞

Alpine.js offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost.

You get to keep your DOM, and sprinkle in behavior as you see fit.

alpine

Sprinkle declarative, reactive behaviour on your HTML with Alpine JS

CSS uses a global namespace for CSS Selectors that can easily result in style conflicts throughout your application when building an application using modern web components. You can avoid this problem by nesting CSS selectors or use a styling convention like BEM but this becomes complicated quickly and won’t scale.

CSS-in-JS avoids these problems entirely by generating unique class names when styles are converted to CSS. This allows you to think about styles on a component level with out worrying about styles defined elsewhere.

In this course, you will learn how to express popular SCSS (Sass) language features using latest JavaScript features. We will convert simple examples from SCSS to CSS-in-JS. As a designer or (S)CSS developer, you should be able to follow without extensive JavaScript knowledge, understanding SCSS is required though. We will not be using any particular CSSinJS libraries. Instead, we will focus on a base knowledge you need later if you use any CSSinJS library.

Sass is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world.

scss

Convert SCSS (Sass) to CSS-in-JS

Have you ever wished for access to conditionals or iteration when writing styles? How cool would it be to use functions to write styles? SCSS has that and more! SCSS is a superset of CSS. Any valid CSS is SCSS, they even have the same syntax. SCSS borrows features from other languages to write smarter, reusable and more readable styles. This course will focus on how to use SCSS’s more useful features, compare them against each other and assess when their usage is appropriate.

Learn the Best and Most Useful SCSS

In this course, we will build a ToDo API that stores notes using the OpenAPI Specification (Swagger). We will start with a blank API definition using the Swagger Online Editor. The Swagger definition file will be used to create a Node.js API. Along the way, we will discover how to implement additional details required for a fully functional API requests and responses. We will also learn about the powerful capabilities of Swagger to generate server side code and client libraries.

Open API Initiative (OAI) is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral API Description Format based on the Swagger Specification

openapi

Build Node.js APIs with OpenAPI Spec (Swagger)

Techniques to improve your CSS, Sass, and HTML implementations for everyday scenarios. 

Learn the Fundamentals of CSS and Sass to Create Modern and Responsive Layouts 

Copy/pasting the same code is redundant and updating copy/pasted code slows development velocity. Mixins are reusable chunks of code that are included, similar to calling a function, instead of copy/pasted.

Mixins have some nice features:
- Arguments just like functions.
- Arguments can have default values and optional values.
- Named arguments allow us to use optional and default arguments when the mixin is included.
- Variable arguments allow us to have a dynamic number of arguments when the mixin is included.
- The @content directive allow us to add additional styles when the mixin is included.

In this lesson we learn how to DRY up the code with the SCSS @mixin directive and make copy/paste a thing of the past.

Reuse Styles with the SCSS @mixin Directive

Updating the same color or metric multiple times is no fun. SCSS variables improve maintainability by allowing one name to represent a value that can be used anywhere. SCSS variables also give us the power of creating our own naming conventions to express the intent of specific values. In this lesson we learn how to use SCSS variables to assign user friendly names to colors/metrics so one value change will update that value in all the right places.

Use SCSS Variables for Readable and Maintainable Stylesheets

SCSS nesting can produce DRYer code by targeting child elements without having to write the parent class. Nesting up to 3 levels deep can help us understand relationships between styles. The SCSS parent selector represents the parent class, so it can DRY up targeting pseudo-elements/classes and be an asset for naming conventions. In this lesson we learn how to remove the redundancy of targeting pseudo-elements/classes, and child elements by taking advantage of SCSS’s nesting and parent selectors.

Organize Styles with SCSS Nesting and the Parent Selector

In this lesson we learn how to set up SCSS  and transpile your SCSS code into CSS with node-sass.

Transpile SCSS to CSS using node-sass

Tired of dealing with monolithic CSS files? Are requests for multiple CSS files hurting your performance? In this lesson we learn how to separate our styles with SCSS partials, and how SCSS imports compile to one file so there's only one request.

Organize SCSS into Multiple Files with Partials

We can write reusable styles with the SCSS @extend or @mixin directives. Which one is better? It depends. A better question is, how do they differ?
Extends:
change the source order, mixins don’t.
maintain relationships, mixins don’t.
share inherited traits, mixins don’t.
can extend multiple classes, mixins don’t.
can create multiple class declarations in the compiled CSS, mixins don’t.
can use the placeholder selector, mixins don’t.

Mixins:
can accept arguments, extends don’t.
can pass additional content, extends don’t.
repeat code when compiled, extends group class names together.
work well wIth media queries, extends have a limited interaction wIth media queries.

In this lesson we learn about writing reusable styles with the @extend directive and how it compares to the @mixin directive.


Reuse Styles with the SCSS @extend Directive

Writing similar classes with minor variations, like utility classes, can be a pain to write and update. Sometimes just a single character is the only difference between classes and updating the defining parameter means we need to change it for every class name and value. We can write a class one time and the @for directive can write all the minor variations for us. If the similar classes need to be updated, with the help of the @for directive, they only need to be updated once. In this lesson we learn how to leverage the power of the SCSS @for control directive to relieve the pain.

Write similar classes with the SCSS @for Control Directive

The SCSS @for directive is great when we know how many iterations are required and we only need 1 variable. What if we need multiple variables to iterate over data sets? Hello SCSS maps and the @each control directive! In this lesson, we’ll check out iterating with lists and looping over data sets with maps and the @each directive.

Loop Over Data with the SCSS @each Control Directive

Writing SCSS @functions is similar to writing functions in other programming languages; they can accept arguments and have return statements. SCSS provides a ton of great features, but sometimes we need to roll our own function. We can do that too! They’re useful when the desired functionality isn’t available from the built in SCSS functions and a mixin just won’t do. In this lesson, we learn how and when to use SCSS function directives.


Write Custom Functions with the SCSS @function Directive

We can use javascript for color and opacity variations, math, list and map logic or to see if something exists. SCSS includes functions for a wide range of common use cases for logic in our styles. In this lesson we look at some of the more useful color functions to improve development velocity, readability, and simplify the code. Be sure to checkout all the SCSS functions: http://sass-lang.com/documentation/Sass/Script/Functions.html

Use Standard Built-in SCSS Functions for Common Operations:

Swagger is a project used to describe restful APIs using the OpenAPI Specification. It allows you to document your API so consumers understand the endpoints, parameters, and responses. In this lesson, I'll show you how to install the swagger command line tool, create a new API project using swagger, and introduce you to the swagger API editor.

Create an API with Swagger

In this lesson, you will learn how to define an HTTP GET endpoint using Swagger with URL parameters to identify the ID of the Todo item being requested.

Define an HTTP GET Endpoint with URL Parameters for a Node.js Server with Swagger

Schema definitions allow you to define the format and types of data sent and received by your API. This allows consumers of your API to be confident in using your API. In this lesson, you will learn how to create a schema definition for the Todo API server. 

Create An API Schema Definition Using Swagger

In this lesson, you will learn how to create an HTTP GET endpoint for a node.js server using Swagger. This endpoint will be used to return all of the Todo items from Elasticsearch to the client.

Define an HTTP GET Endpoint for a Node.js API Server with Swagger

This lesson shows you how to delete a Todo item from Elasticsearch using the Todo ID from the URL parameters according to the specifications defined in your Swagger API docs.

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