Book Image

Mastering TypeScript - Fourth Edition

By : Nathan Rozentals
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Mastering TypeScript - Fourth Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Nathan Rozentals

Overview of this book

TypeScript is both a language and a set of tools to generate JavaScript, designed by Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft to help developers write enterprise-scale JavaScript. Mastering Typescript is a golden standard for budding and experienced developers. With a structured approach that will get you up and running with Typescript quickly, this book will introduce core concepts, then build on them to help you understand (and apply) the more advanced language features. You’ll learn by doing while acquiring the best programming practices along the way. This fourth edition also covers a variety of modern JavaScript and TypeScript frameworks, comparing their strengths and weaknesses. You'll explore Angular, React, Vue, RxJs, Express, NodeJS, and others. You'll get up to speed with unit and integration testing, data transformation, serverless technologies, and asynchronous programming. Next, you’ll learn how to integrate with existing JavaScript libraries, control your compiler options, and use decorators and generics. By the end of the book, you will have built a comprehensive set of web applications, having integrated them into a single cohesive website using micro front-end techniques. This book is about learning the language, understanding when to apply its features, and selecting the framework that fits your real-world project perfectly.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
17
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18
Index

TypeScript basics

JavaScript is not strongly typed. It is a language that is very dynamic, as it allows for objects to change their types, properties, and behavior on the fly. TypeScript, however, is strongly typed, and as such will enforce rules that govern how we use variables, functions, and objects.

In this section of the chapter, we will work through the basics of the TypeScript language. We will start with the concepts of strong typing, or static typing as it is also known. We will then move on to exploring some of the basic types that the language uses, and how the language can detect what type a variable is, based on how and where it is used within our code. We will then tackle the basics of function signatures, show how to debug our code with VS Code, and finally see how to import and use third-party JavaScript libraries.

Strong typing

Strong typing, or static typing as it is also known, means that when we create a variable, or define a parameter in a function...