Primer to TypeScript

TypeScript originated from shortcomings in JavaScript development with the advent of using JavaScript for large-scale applications. TypeScript introduced a JavaScript compiler with presets of syntactical language extensions, class-based programming, and ways to convert extensions into regular JavaScript. TypeScript became extremely popular as it introduced type safety in JavaScript, which happens to be one of the most flexible languages ever. This enables JavaScript to be a more object-oriented and compile safe language. TypeScript is more of a superset of ES standards, which enables developers to write cleaner, easy-to-refactor, and upgradable code. In this section, we will go through various primary topics of TypeScript, which are essential for our journey ahead. TypeScript is JavaScript with type annotations. TypeScript has a transpiler and type checker, which throws an error if there is a mismatch in types, and converts TypeScript code to JavaScript code. We will look at the following topics briefly, which will essentially help us to write Node.js in TypeScript:

• Understanding tsconfig.json
• Understanding types 
• Debugging TypeScript in Node.js