In this article, I will show you my first experience with TypeScript. I will follow instructions from the TypeScript website tutorials to create a “Hello World” example. What TypeScript is and reasons to use it can be found here.

The first step is to install TypeScript using the command:

npm install -g typescript

After the command is completed you will see a message informing you that one module has been added. The command to compile files is:

tsc <filename>.ts

Here is my “Hello World” example in the JS console. I start with the following .ts file:

const msg:string = "Hello World!";
console.log(msg);

and after compiling it I receive:

var msg = "Hello World!";
console.log(msg);

In this basic example, there are almost no differences between the original file and the one after compilation. The only one is that I declare the constant “msg” as a string and when the process is completed I have code without it. In this example, there is no big impact, but TypeScript will be useful when you work on a big project and have to declare many classes and have to be careful about types. TypeScript can help you make your code cleaner and less error-prone.

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