Book Image

Learn TypeScript 3 by Building Web Applications

By : Sebastien Dubois, Alexis Georges
Book Image

Learn TypeScript 3 by Building Web Applications

By: Sebastien Dubois, Alexis Georges

Overview of this book

TypeScript is a superset of the JavaScript programming language, giving developers a tool to help them write faster, cleaner JavaScript. With the help of its powerful static type system and other powerful tools and techniques it allows developers to write modern JavaScript applications. This book is a practical guide to learn the TypeScript programming language. It covers from the very basics to the more advanced concepts, while explaining many design patterns, techniques, frameworks, libraries and tools along the way. You will also learn a ton about modern web frameworks like Angular, Vue.js and React, and you will build cool web applications using those. This book also covers modern front-end development tooling such as Node.js, npm, yarn, Webpack, Parcel, Jest, and many others. Throughout the book, you will also discover and make use of the most recent additions of the language introduced by TypeScript 3 such as new types enforcing explicit checks, flexible and scalable ways of project structuring, and many more breaking changes. By the end of this book, you will be ready to use TypeScript in your own projects and will also have a concrete view of the current frontend software development landscape.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Using the unknown keyword

Did you notice the unknown keyword used in the Fetch API example? Here's the code we are referring to: .then((jsonContent: unknown) >= ...​.

The unknown keyword was introduced with TypeScript 3.0. It is a type safe alternative to the any keyword that we have used so far in this book. With this keyword, we simply tell TypeScript that the type of the jsonContent object is not known at this point and that it should be checked before being manipulated. Basically, it means that the content should not be trusted and considered safe to use as is.

Anything can be assigned to a variable with the unknown type, but not the other way around. You cannot assign an object of type unknown to anything but itself and any unless you perform type checks to assert the type. Also, no operations can be applied to an unknown object without first performing type...