Learning React: A Hands-On Guide to Building Web Applications Using React and Redux, Second edition

11

The Component Lifecycle

In the beginning, we took a very simple view of components and what they do. As you learned more about React and did cooler and more involved things, you came to see that components aren’t all that simple. They help us deal with properties, state, and events, and often are responsible for the well-being of other components as well. Keeping track of everything components do sometimes can be tough.

To help with this, React provides us with lifecycle methods. Unsurprisingly, lifecycle methods are special methods that automatically get called as our component goes about its business. They notify us of important milestones in a component’s life, and we can use these notifications to simply pay attention or change what ...