[braindongle]

Is this an efficient doorway into understanding CSS grid, one that has the bonus of giving you useful code? Or, is this more of a crutch, the output of which will not educate you about the grid goodness?

I'd like it to be the former, so that I can be productive out of the gate and figure out what I'm doing as I go. That may be unprofessional, but I make quick-and-dirty prototypes for academics; nothing that has to scale. Plus, I'm lazy.

[acobster]

This is the best resource I've found about making your own grid goodness, if that's what you're after: http://j4n.co/blog/Creating-your-own-css-grid-system

This tool seems oriented at abstracting away a lot of detail, and to be aimed at solutions that have to scale. If I wanted to learn as I go, I'd start without the abstractions.

[Ndymium]

That has nothing to do with CSS Grid, though, which is what the IBM tool is about. CSS Grid being the new way to layout in CSS: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-grid-1/

[jwarren]

I think you'd be best placed to at least familiarise yourself with the concepts of CSS Grid first.

I had a bunch of my colleagues work through http://cssgridgarden.com/, which seemed to be a good first start for them. There are tons of other resources out there, so it depends what you're after.

[mcintyre1994]

Wes Bos has a free video course: https://cssgrid.io/ which he says is about 4 hours long - might be a good balance? I haven't took this course yet, but I've took enough of his others to know I won't regret recommending it. :)

[ssalka]

There are definitely some patterns you can abstract away for making CSS grids, but to me they're so simple (and fun to implement) that in most cases it's just easier to do it yourself.