Enhance your TypeScript skills with essential guidelines that promote good coding practices. This collection of rules focuses on effective type management, object-oriented design patterns, and maintaining a clean codebase for optimal performance.
TypeScript’s any keyword is a blessing and a curse. It is a type that can be anything, where every possible property and method exists and also returns any. It can be casted to and from anything and is how you tell the compiler to get out of your way.
However, it’s easy to use it as a crutch, and as a result, miss out on handy intellisense, refactoring support and compile-time safety – the main benefits of TypeScript!
This comes down to personal preference, but there are only a few times when you must define a type in TypeScript, for example:
- When initializing a variable with an ambiguous value (eg. null)
- Function parameters
Of course, there are also times when you may want to be more explicit – you may want to have an interface as a function return value instead of the class, for example.
It's super important to ensure that magic strings are not used in your codebase. Typically, we would use constant values or enums to solve this problem, but this may not be applicable when using TypeScript. You might expect TypeScript enums to function like strongly typed languages like C# but often this is not the case.
TypeScript is a powerful language that transpiles to JavaScript, and provides much desired type-safety and IDE refactoring support. But without good configuration, a lot of the benefits can be lost.
Each file in TypeScript is a module, and each module can export whatever members it wants. However, if you export everything, you run the risk of having to increment major versions (when using semantic versioning), or having your module used in unintended ways.