Getting started with React

For this chapter, we will take a short step outside of the Go ecosystem. For working with React, you will need a development environment offering Node.js, npm, and a TypeScript compiler, which we will set up in the following section.

Setting up Node.js and TypeScript

JavaScript is a dynamically typed language. Although (like Go) it does have a notion of data types, a JavaScript variable can (unlike Go) basically have any type at any time. Since we do not want you to start missing the Go compiler and Go's type safety during our brief excursion into the JavaScript world, we will use TypeScript in this example. TypeScript is a type-safe superset of JavaScript that adds static typing and class-based OOP to JavaScript. You can compile TypeScript to JavaScript using the TypeScript compiler (or short, tsc).

First of all, in addition to your Go runtime, you will need a working Node.js runtime set up on your development machine. Take a look at https://nodejs.org/en/download...