The goal of this chapter is for you to learn about the life cycle of React components and how to write code that responds to life cycle events. You'll learn why components need a life cycle in the first place. Then, you'll implement several components that initialize their properties and state using these methods.

Next, you'll learn about how to optimize the rendering efficiency of your components by avoiding rendering when it isn't necessary. Then, you'll see how to encapsulate the imperative code in React components and how to clean up when components are unmounted. Finally, you'll learn how to capture and handle errors using new React 16 life cycle methods.

Here are the sections we'll cover in this chapter:

• Why components need a life cycle
• Initializing properties and state
• Optimizing rendering efficiency
• Rendering...