Let's see and check sereral things before going through how to use Trowel.
Trowel is based on some key features of sass like variables, mixins, functions, map. Make sure to be confortable with sass before reading further.
Trowel is designed for a specific kind of methodology. It is a "component focus" framework which means it is made to design visual component independently that you will then assemble into a web page. This methodology is well known as atomic design. We strongly recommand you to read this article written by Brad Frost the creator of the Atomic Design.
Trowel is also deeply based on BEM which is a methodology for naming css classes. Even if we can change the syntax the classes generated with Trowel, the BEM philosophy will remain, which make it the last prerequisite required before playing with Trowel.
next section : How to use a Trowel component