TypeScript continues to grow in popularity and for good reason. It adds “guard rails” to your code to help you spot issues early on, easily locate problem code, enhance productivity, provide consistency across code, and much more. While there are a lot of TypeScript resources out there to get started learning the language, where can you go to get started quickly without wasting a lot of time?
I recently published a series of short videos on TypeScript core concepts that can provide a great starting point. The videos are short, super focused, and many of them use the online TypeScript Playground to demonstrate different concepts. There are a few videos on getting started working with TypeScript locally on your machine as well.
Here’s more information about each video.
1. Why Learn TypeScript?
Is it worth your time to learn TypeScript? Short answer (in my opinion anyway) is YES! In this video I’ll walk through 5 reasons learning TypeScript is worth the effort. Since these videos are intended to be short I could only cover 5, but there are many additional reasons as well!
2. Adding TypeScript to a VS Code Project
How do you get started using TypeScript, writing, and building your code? I’ll walk you through the basics of that process in this video.
3. How to Add WebPack to a TypeScript Project
WebPack’s scary right? Well, truth be told it can be intimidating at times, but it’s pretty easy to use it in TypeScript projects. I’ll walk you through the process in this video.
4. Getting Started with TypeScript Types
It’s no secret that TypeScript adds “strong typing” into your code (they call it TypeScript for a reason). In this video I’ll explain the primitive data types available and show how you can get started using them.
5. Using Classes in TypeScript
Classes are a feature available in JavaScript that can be used to encapsulate your code. They’re not needed for every type of project, but it’s good to know what they’re capable of. In this video I’ll introduce classes and show how they can be used in TypeScript.
6. Using Interfaces in TypeScript
In an earlier video I introduced the concept of TypeScript types. In this video, I walk you through how you can use interfaces to build custom types and explain why you may want to do that. Interfaces are “code contracts” that can be used to describe the “shape” of an object, drive consistency across objects, and more.
7. Using Generics with TypeScript
Generics are “code templates” that can be reused in your code base. In this video I introduce the concept of generics and show simple examples of how they can be used in TypeScript.
Are there more topics that I could have covered? Yep – there’s always more. However, these videos should provide you with a solid starting point to understand core concepts and features. There are a lot of additional resources out there to learn TypeScript (you can start with the docs or the handbook), but I hope these short videos help get you started quickly. I’m personally a huge fan of TypeScript and highly recommend making time to learn it.
If you’d like to dive into more details about TypeScript fundamentals, check out the TypeScript Fundamentals video course on Pluralsight that John Papa and I created.
