Learn Android, Natural 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

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’ll work through Natural’s API for natural language processing in JavaScript. We’ll look at how to process text: learning how to break up language strings, find the word roots, work with inflectors, find sequences of words, and tag parts of speech. We’ll learn how to find important stats about a body of text: how to compare strings, how to classify text with machine learning, how to use the tf-idf tool to find relevant words. We’ll look at some of the extra tools Natural gives us, including the dictionary/thesaurus of WordNet, a phonetics comparer that lets us see if two words sound the same, and a spellcheck feature. We’ll also look at tries and digraphs, two data structures that help us better analyze bodies of text.

Natural is a general natural language facility for nodejs. Tokenizing, stemming, classification, phonetics, tf-idf, WordNet, string similarity, and some inflections are currently supported.

natural

Natural Language Processing in JavaScript with Natural

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 

Open source framework for building truly native mobile apps with Angular, TypeScript or JavaScript.

nativescript

We will learn how to add an Android library to our project and translate it’s Java api to NativeScript. For this lesson, we will look at [Filestack’s Android SDK](https://github.com/filestack/filepicker-android) built with Gradle. Specifically, we will cover how to immediately start working with the library even when a [NativeScript](/q/nativescript) plugin does not exist for it.

Use an Android library in NativeScript for Angular using Java apis

Java has been around a long time and when it comes to Android, you will encounter some structures that may throw you for a loop on how to code against with NativeScript. Let’s examine a few common Java/Android api constructs you may encounter and how to translate them to NativeScript. Learn how to get references to local files in your app using the ‘file-system’ module as well as how to take advantage of NativeScript’s Observable class to send notification events from one class to another. Lastly, look at considerations with Angular’s NgZone when handling your native libraries data events to update component view bindings.

Translate common Java/Android APIs into NativeScript for Angular Android apps

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

One of the exciting benefits you have with NativeScript is the ability to write native code (Java and Objective C) directly in JavaScript/TypeScript allowing you to create a consistent high level api over top of both underlying iOS Objective C/Swift and Android Java apis. In this lesson, we will look at how to design a consistent api that taps into the appropriate native api’s on the target platforms using underlying native libraries.

Develop a consistent plugin api across your Android and iOS NativeScript app

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:

To prepare your development environment to code against native apis such as Objective C, Swift and Java, let's learn how to [install tns-platform-declarations](https://www.npmjs.com/package/tns-platform-declarations) to provide rich intellisense support for all the native iOS and Android api’s. This lesson will cover how to modify your tsconfig.json and references.d.ts properly to ensure working with native api’s is smooth and as helpful as possible.

Prepare for native iOS and Android api intellisense with NativeScript

We will learn about “stemming,” the process of finding the root of words, often in order to group words by a common base root. We will look at the Porter and Lancaster Stemmers, briefly touch on Natural’s support for Russian and Spanish stemmers, and introduce the function to stem and tokenize at the same time.

Find the roots of words using stemming in Natural

Inflectors are the modifiers of a word that indicate grammatical categories. While Natural’s coverage of inflectors is not comprehensive, we will show how Natural can pluralize/singularize nouns and count numbers. 

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