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basarat
typescript-book
TypeScript2017–2025
basarat / typescript-book

typescript-book

:books: The definitive guide to TypeScript and possibly the best TypeScript book :book:. Free and Open Source 🌹

Web DevelopmentLearning & Reference
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5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
21.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

:books: The definitive guide to TypeScript and possibly the best TypeScript book :book:. Free and Open Source 🌹

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-10-30 17:36:58 UTC to 2025-07-25 20:57:19 UTC.

0122017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
dimava·Jul 25, 2025
Edit: it got fixed, thanks to the author I think with majority of TypeScript projects using Prettier, 2 is more likely to be the default[0] The linked page literally says to ignore it [1] > STOP READING IMMEDIATELY THIS PAGE PROBABLY DOES NOT PERTAIN TO YOU > These are Coding Guidelines for Contributors to TypeScript. This is NOT a prescriptive guideline for the TypeScript community. 4 is a historical thing used as a default for all languages in VSCode [2] [0] https://prettier.io/docs/options#tab-width [1] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Coding-guidelin... [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/41200 Edit: found the TS style guide at https://github.com/basarat/typescript-book/blob/master/docs/... , it should be the correct link P.S. did send a mail to author hopefully they fix it
In The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious
aristofun·Jul 13, 2022
This is a great overview of some deep parts of TS https://github.com/basarat/typescript-book From personal experience the biggest issue to overcome when migrating from java etc. was to embrace prototype based OOP and the functional nature of JS (not in theoretical sense), where class keyword is just a syntax sugar over function with closures etc. Nothing looks uglier than TS/JS code written by experienced java/C# programmer with no js experience :)
In Ask HN: Best React and TypeScript book for experienced programmers?
veidr·Aug 28, 2019
I'm all for more new and innovative languages, but I think the key thing about TypeScript is not that it compiles to JavaScript, but (to quote basarat's great free book[1]) that "TypeScript is just JavaScript with docs". TypeScript is a strict superset of JavaScript, so all our real-world JavaScript is TypeScript already — you can literally just change the file extension from .js to .ts. Now, our existing JS code probably isn't great TypeScript, since it doesn't leverage those great machine-and-human-readable docs (the type system). So, compared to code written from the beginning with TypeScript, our existing code doesn't go as far toward reducing the likelihood that we humans miss something while programming, and introduce a bug. And we probably won't get all the automated assistance that we could be getting from our machines, in terms o
Read the rest
f auto-complete, as-you-type errors and warnings, automatic imports, etc. But for projects coming from JavaScript, it's hard to overstate the importance of being able to start from a place where all your existing code works like it always has, and you can choose the right mix of when/if to upgrade your legacy JavaScript code to TypeScript. I think that design decision is probably the key to TypeScript's explosive adoption and popularity. A lot of languages could give you strong typing, and the increased code correctness and massively improved tooling that comes along with that — but I don't know of any others that literally require no code changes to start adopting them. Of course, the choice to remain a superset of JavaScript does place some significant limitations on what kinds of cool improvements TypeScript can add. It can't break JavaScript code so lots of cool things one might imagine won't be possible. Still, a great tradeoff IMO. [1]: https://github.com/basarat/typescript-book
In TypeScript 3.6
dmitriid·Oct 30, 2017
“exhaustiveness checking”: automatically making sure that we’ve covered all of the possible cases anywhere that we interact with a piece of data [1] Typescript doesn’t do that. There’s a way to manually force exhaustive checking with discriminating unions: https://github.com/basarat/typescript-book/blob/master/docs/... However, it’s a manual workaround. [1] Quoted from http://www.adamsolove.com/js/flow/type/2016/04/15/flow-exhau...
In So you want to write a type checker (2014)

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