Learning React

11. The Component Lifecycle

In the beginning, we started off with a very simple view of components and what they do. As we learned more about React and did cooler and more involved things, it turns out our components aren’t all that simple. They help deal with properties, state, 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 something known as lifecycle methods. Lifecycle methods are (unsurprisingly) special methods that automatically get called as our component goes about its business. They notify us of important milestones in our component’s life, and we can use these notifications to simply pay attention ...