Book Image

The TypeScript Workshop

By : Ben Grynhaus, Jordan Hudgens, Rayon Hunte, Matt Morgan, Vekoslav Stefanovski
5 (1)
Book Image

The TypeScript Workshop

5 (1)
By: Ben Grynhaus, Jordan Hudgens, Rayon Hunte, Matt Morgan, Vekoslav Stefanovski

Overview of this book

By learning TypeScript, you can start writing cleaner, more readable code that’s easier to understand and less likely to contain bugs. What’s not to like? It’s certainly an appealing prospect, but learning a new language can be challenging, and it’s not always easy to know where to begin. This book is the perfect place to start. It provides the ideal platform for JavaScript programmers to practice writing eloquent, productive TypeScript code. Unlike many theory-heavy books, The TypeScript Workshop balances clear explanations with opportunities for hands-on practice. You’ll quickly be up and running building functional websites, without having to wade through pages and pages of history and dull, dry fluff. Guided exercises clearly demonstrate how key concepts are used in the real world, and each chapter is rounded off with an activity that challenges you to apply your new knowledge in the context of a realistic scenario. Whether you’re a hobbyist eager to get cracking on your next project, or a professional developer looking to unlock your next promotion, pick up a copy and make a start! Whatever your motivation, by the end of this book, you’ll have the confidence and understanding to make it happen with TypeScript.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Preface

Reflection

The concept of decorating your code is tightly coupled with a concept called reflection. In a nutshell, reflection is the capability of a certain piece of code to examine and be introspective about itself – in a sense, to do some navel-gazing. It means that a piece of code can have access to things such as the variables, functions, and classes defined inside it. Most languages provide us with some kind of reflection API that enables us to treat the code itself as if it was data, and since TypeScript is built upon JavaScript, it inherits the JavaScript reflection capabilities.

JavaScript does not have an extensive reflection API, but there is a proposal (https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-reflection) to add proper metadata (data about data) support to the language.

Setting Up Compiler Options

TypeScript's decorators use the aforementioned proposed feature, and in order to use them, you have to enable the TypeScript compiler (tsc) accordingly. As covered in...