Chapter 2. TypeScript Basics

One of the primary benefits of compiled languages is that they provide a more plain syntax for the developer to work with before the code is eventually converted to machine code. TypeScript is able to bring this advantage to JavaScript development by wrapping several different patterns into language constructs that allow us to write better code. We have talked a little bit about the static type system that TypeScript adds on top of JavaScript. Every explicit type annotation that is provided is simply syntactic sugar that will be removed during compilation, but not before their constraints are analyzed and any errors are caught. In this chapter, we will explore this type system in depth. We will also discuss the different language structures that TypeScript introduces. We will look at how these structures are emitted by the compiler into plain JavaScript. This chapter will contain a detailed look at each of these concepts:

• Types
• Functions
• Interfaces
• Classes
• Enums
• Modules
• Generic types