Is TypeScript difficult to learn?

I just finished course from Jad, and it was a pure joy to follow.

That being said :

I’m not affiliated or whatsoever
It’s not a review about this course

It’s my personal feeling about the difficulty of learning TypeScript

My background

Learned and practice Java professionnally for many years, then switched to untyped languages, mostly JS and Ruby.

Difficulty of practicing TS without proper training

I think I made a mistake here. Because I already knew Java in-depth, I didn’t need to learn the basics of TS before practicing.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Do yourself a favor : don’t be like me.

Review everything from the base. Here is what will happen :

Oh, I guessed it from experience
Woot? No way I would have implemented it this way.
Tons of ah-ah moments

How hard was it to learn TypeScript

It is one thing to read the lesson, but another to fight the TS compiler complaining about things going wrong.

Even with experience with other languages, I struggled one time or two during exercice.

So TS is not completely easy, but I would say it is not too complicated.

Take your time to grab every concept

And reading will not be enough. Be prepare to suffer on exercices.

How hard it is? Well, for a complete beginner, you will take more time, of course. But nothing undoable, so don’t be too shy either.

For a beginner, I wouldn’t advise the official docs. I loved Jad’s course, but there are probably other good online courses nowadays. It will give you enough guidance to properly climb the moutain without sacrifying too much energy.

Can ChatGPT help?

Hmm nowadays I would say 50-50. I mean, it may point out the right bug, or give a vague but correct idea around 50% of the time. Or just be completely wrong the other half of the time.

What is sure it that it won’t help you if you don’t take time to understand the basics anyway.

What helped me a lot

I think my biggest “ah-ah” moment, was when I decided to replace “type” and “interface” keyword by “contract” (in my head only, “contract” does not exist in TS).

At that point, everything tricky stuff was a lot clearer.

TS just define contracts about what variables, classes and functions should be.