June 2022
Beginner
320 pages
6h 40m
English
Content preview from Learning TypeScript
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Chapter 1. From JavaScript to TypeScript
JavaScript today
Supports browsers decades past
Beauty of the web
Before talking about TypeScript, we need to first understand where it came from: JavaScript!
History of JavaScript
JavaScript was designed in 10 days by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995 to be approachable and easy to use for websites. Developers have been poking fun at its quirks and perceived shortcomings ever since. I’ll cover some of them in the next section.
JavaScript has evolved tremendously since 1995, though! Its steering committee, TC39, has released new versions of ECMAScript—the language specification that JavaScript is based on—yearly since 2015 with new features that bring it in line with other modern languages. Impressively, even with regular new language versions, JavaScript has managed to maintain backward compatibility for decades in varying environments, including browsers, embedded applications, and server runtimes.
Today, JavaScript is a wonderfully flexible language with a lot of strengths. One should appreciate that while JavaScript has its quirks, it’s also helped enable the incredible growth of web applications and the internet.
Show me the perfect programming language and I’ll show you a language with no users.
Anders Hejlsberg, TSConf 2019
Vanilla JavaScript’s Pitfalls
Developers often refer to using JavaScript without any significant language extensions or frameworks as “vanilla”: referring to it being the familiar, original flavor. I’ll soon ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.