When I started using TypeScript for my Angular applications, I was confused about all the different ways with which you could import other modules. import './polyfills.ts'; import { Component } from '@angular/core'; import HomeComponent from './pages/home/home-page.component'; import * as _ from 'lodash'; import assert = require('assert'); At first, I thought that as a programmer you could choose whether you wanted to use curly braces or not, but I quickly found out that that was not the case. It all depends on how the module that you are importing is structured. I have created an overview of the different ways by which a module can be exported, together with their corresponding import syntax. Most of them are actually plain ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) module syntax that TypeScript uses as well. The examples are from my solution to the first puzzle of Advent of Code 2016 and can be found on GitHub if you want to play around with imports and exports yourself.