Introduction

[00:00:00]
>> Anjana: Hello and welcome to TypeScript First Steps We are here We are ready to TypeScript, hopefully And I'm super excited to be here with y'all today I'm Anjana You might have seen some of my other courses, including JavaScript First Steps on the Frontend Masters platform And really excited because today we're going to take our first steps with TypeScript So moving towards a new language in a little bit away, sort of maybe asterisk, from our tried and true good old friend JavaScript

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So, what are we going to do What are we going to learn Well, first of all, we're going to take a moment to step back and think about the motivations behind TypeScript Why does TypeScript even exist What is it And how does it relate to JavaScript Does it relate to JavaScript And then we're going to start talking also about the how of working with TypeScript, how can we install it How can we get our development environment set up, and we're going to be gradually moving from JavaScript code to TypeScript code using TypeScript to help us make that transition

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We're also going to be diving into various features and syntax and functionality of TypeScript We're going to be talking about how we add types to our scripts, because it seems like that would be relevant, right And we're going to start talking about some fancy catchphrases and jargon that you might have heard of things like union types and type narrowing, type guards, and interfaces and extending interfaces, generic types and parameterized types and all these fancy buzzwords that we're going to try to make sense of together

[00:02:01]
And we are going to also be thinking about the nuts and bolts of working with TypeScript on the daily So how do we set up our dev environments How do we set up our IDE How do we make sure that TypeScript knows exactly what we want it to do and how we want it to behave And what do we have to work with in the wider TypeScript ecosystem How can we make sure that we're leveraging the amazing community of TypeScript developers and all of the great tools that they've written for us, using things like open source libraries

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So probably by now, if you have ever worked with TypeScript before, you most likely have these things installed already, but just in case, you're going to need Node installed and that includes npm And that is, yeah, going to be something we use quite frequently here, and we're going to want an IDE that can integrate well with TypeScript, and there is no IDE that integrates tighter with TypeScript than VS Code because they're both built by Microsoft, so

[00:03:11]
I'm going to be working in VS Code if you really, really don't want to use code or one of its kind of derived forks, that's fine, but we're going to be using that as our reference point because that's where we'll get some nice TypeScript hinting and things like that And then the thing that you're going to need to do that you probably haven't done already is check out the workshop repo, which is on GitHub

[00:03:41]
My handle is Anjana Vakil slash TypeScript minus first minus steps, and there you will find all of the exercises that we're going to go through in each of the parts of the course So we're also going to be working through them together So if you don't want to install things locally to follow along, that's also OK You can also be copying and pasting some of the code samples that we look at into things like the TypeScript Playground, which we'll look at in a moment.