TypeScript in 50 Lessons

by Stefan Baumgartner, Smashing Magazine (Editor)

In “TypeScript in 50 Lessons”, Stefan Baumgartner breaks down the quirks of TypeScript into short, manageable lessons. You’ll make sense of TypeScript concepts, tooling for TypeScript and how to get most out of it without learning a new language. Everything TypeScript explained, from start to finish.



Written for seasoned and not-so-seasoned developers who know enough JavaScript to be dangerous, or want to dive deeper into TypeScript. With code walkthroughs, hands-on examples and common gotchas, that’s a book you might want to keep close.



You’ll

• TypeScript concepts, and how to make sense of them all.

• TypeScript tooling, needed to use the language effectively.

• How to get most out of TypeScript without learning a new language.

• Structural type systems, their semantics, and why they matter.

• Low-maintenance types and how to write types once, and let them grow automatically as code evolves.

• How to bend the type system to make it fit the needs of your projects.

• TypeScript culture and how the language is evolving.



Table of



1. TypeScript for Smashing People

2. Functions

3. Union and Intersection Types

4. Generics

5. Conditional Types

6. Thinking in Types

Genres: Programming, Technology, Nonfiction, Computer Science, Software

369 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 17, 2020

Reviews

[Joshua]

While TypeScript seems incredibly fascinating, the code analysis aspect is really what I came looking for and got excited about. I’ll delve into deeply learning about types from a TypeScript perspective another time.

[Rin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rushed the last chapters because it became quite heavy for my needs. But it was very eye-opening on Typescript and how to work with types. I think I'll keep some of the examples for training !

[Marcin Lasak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complete guide through TS. Highly recommend. Especialy chapters about Generics and Conditional types.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear explanations and well written! Can't recommend enough !

[Redowan Delowar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covers a lot. It assumes that you might not only be new to TypeScript but also to type-system in general. As a consequence, there's a lot of prose and handholding. Probably I'm not the targeted audience here but it feels like the book is mostly geared towards FE engineers who're usually not expected to know much outside of their framework of choice.

I do like the friendly tone of how it approaches the topics but the gist gets quickly lost in the prose. The text/example ratio is low enough to make me put it aside quickly. However, I think that the details do help the chapters that explain Generics and Conditional Types; those are great. Overall, if you have previous experience of working with types, I'd say look at the Handbook and then go through Effective TypeScript by Dan Vanderkam; both are fantastic resources to learn about writing type-safe dynamic code.

[Göran Törnquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wish I would have learned TypeScript from this book the first time around. I started reading it since I found that it had chapters that covered features of TypeScript I needed to quickly learn and apply in current projects.

Instead of focusing on just the lessons that covered what I needed, I decided to read it from cover to cover. Turned out that it was a brilliant decision. I learned something new from almost every chapter.

[Emil Esplund · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books contains a lot of great tips and tricks and explanations of Typescript concepts that I've previously had difficulties understanding. However, I think it would be even better if there were more visualizations of the different concepts. It can become a bit too much when the books is full of text and code and has no visual explanations. It would be easier to digest and understand the content if it had more visuals.

Overall great book about Typescript anyway!

[Michał Hawełka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of knowledge about TypeScript but with the more complex examples it was hard to follow, some kind of visualisation would definitely help. You have this wall of text and code so it's really tough to know what's going on. Apart from that it's a really concise guide to TS.

Ah, one more thing - in the later parts of the book I feel that the "type safety" was put over the readability of the code. So it could be good or bad, depends on your preferences.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started strong, but by the end the code samples were so riddled with bugs that it was almost unusable. I have little patience for how-to books that force me to debug their work while trying to learn the topic they are teaching. It distracts me from learning and exponentially increases my frustration with the topic. I am glad this reading experience is over.

[Dmitry Bezverkhiy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've learnt some features of TypeScript that I didn't know about and overall structured my knowledge. But the ebook was not so straight forward as it looks and contained a lot of errors. I guess it would be better to remove the lessons and just explain type concepts with examples.