Book Image

Mastering TypeScript 3 - Third Edition

By : Nathan Rozentals
Book Image

Mastering TypeScript 3 - Third Edition

By: Nathan Rozentals

Overview of this book

TypeScript is both a language and a set of tools to generate JavaScript. It was designed by Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft to help developers write enterprise-scale JavaScript. Starting with an introduction to the TypeScript language, before moving on to basic concepts, each section builds on previous knowledge in an incremental and easy-to-understand way. Advanced and powerful language features are all covered, including asynchronous programming techniques, decorators, and generics. This book explores many modern JavaScript and TypeScript frameworks side by side in order for the reader to learn their respective strengths and weaknesses. It will also thoroughly explore unit and integration testing for each framework. Best-of-breed applications utilize well-known design patterns in order to be scalable, maintainable, and testable. This book explores some of these object-oriented techniques and patterns, and shows real-world implementations. By the end of the book, you will have built a comprehensive, end-to-end web application to show how TypeScript language features, design patterns, and industry best practices can be brought together in a real-world scenario.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
TypeScript Tools and Framework Options

Basic types

JavaScript, by nature, is described as a dynamically typed language. This means that any particular variable can hold a number of data types, including numbers, strings, arrays, objects, and functions. The type of a variable in JavaScript is determined by assignment. This means that when we assign a value to a variable, the JavaScript runtime interpreter determines the type of that variable.

However, the JavaScript runtime can also reassign the type of a variable depending on how it is being used, or on how it is interacting with other variables. It may assign a number to a string, for example, in certain cases.

Let's take a look at an example of this dynamic typing in JavaScript and what errors it can introduce. Then, we will explore the strong typing that TypeScript uses and its basic type system.

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