Book Image

Learning TypeScript 2.x - Second Edition

By : Remo H. Jansen
Book Image

Learning TypeScript 2.x - Second Edition

By: Remo H. Jansen

Overview of this book

TypeScript is an open source and cross-platform statically typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript and runs in any browser or host. This book is a step-by-step guide that will take you through the use and benefits of TypeScript with the help of practical examples. You will start off by understanding the basics as well as the new features of TypeScript 2.x. Then, you will learn how to work with functions and asynchronous programming APIs. You will continue by learning how to resolve runtime issues and how to implement TypeScript applications using the Object-oriented programming (OOP) and functional programming (FP) paradigms. Later, you will automate your development workflow with the help of tools such as Webpack. Towards the end of this book, you will delve into some real-world scenarios by implementing some full-stack TypeScript applications with Node.js, React and Angular as well as how to optimize and test them. Finally, you will be introduced to the internal APIs of the TypeScript compiler, and you will learn how to create custom code analysis tools.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Core features of the TypeScript type system

In this section, we are going to learn about some of the core features of the TypeScript type system. This includes concepts such as union types, intersection guards, type guards, and type aliases.

Union types

TypeScript allows you to declare union types:

let path: string[]|string;
path = "/temp/log.xml";
path = ["/temp/log.xml", "/temp/errors.xml"];
path = 1; // Error

In the preceding example, we have declared a variable named path that can contain a single path (string) or a collection of paths (array of strings). In the example, we have also set the value of the variable. We assigned a string and an array of strings without errors; however, when we attempted...