Use the useEffect React Hook Instead of the componentDidMount Lifecycle Method

If you want to make an AJAX call when a React component class component loads, then you can do that in the componentDidMount lifecycle method. However, there is no lifecycle methods in React functional components. Instead, you can use the useEffect hook!

In this lesson, we'll use the useEffect hook to fetch some JSON from an API when our React component loads. We'll also avoid an infinite loop by passing an empty array of dependencies to the hook, and use the 2nd form of the useState hook inside of useEffect, which takes a callback to get the current value of the useState state.