Our friends at Code School are offering a free course in Sass to readers of The Industry.

Code School is an online education platform for web development, with an emphasis on practical skills and interactive exercises. Courses cover a range of subjects, from back-end languages like Ruby to front-end languages like CSS and development tools like Git.

If you’re unfamiliar with Sass, here’s what you need to know, courtesy of the Sass website:

Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows. Sass both provides a simpler, more elegant syntax for CSS and implements various features that are useful for creating manageable stylesheets.

This may sound a bit esoteric if you’ve never used a CSS preprocessor before. Essentially, Sass is a language that augments CSS with additional features like variables and functions. Despite the additional features, it still compiles to pure CSS, so you can use it without concern about browser support beyond the usual compatibility madness. Compiling Sass is a cinch — in addition to the traditional Ruby gem, Sass is supported by compilers like Hammer and CodeKit.

Sass’s main competitor is LESS. Developers tend to get polemical about the tools they use, but despite the neverending debate on Sass vs. LESS, there’s much to be said for both. If you’re considering a switch, however, Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks has a nice outline of why he prefers Sass to LESS.

The Code School course covers the basics of Sass, as well as some practical uses such as integrating it into your responsive workflow. If you’re a front-end developer interested in building out your skillset, or a designer looking to get into development, this course will be well worth your time.

Use this link to access Code School’s ”Assembling Sass” course, available free to readers of The Industry until February 6th. Once you’ve added it to your account, you’ll have free lifetime access. Try it out, and let us know what you think in the comments!