requests Library

requests is the most-used third-party Python library on PyPI for a reason: it makes HTTP calls ordinary. Where the standard library's urllib.request requires manual body encoding, hand-set headers, and treats 404s as exceptions, requests provides one function per HTTP method, friendly keyword arguments for common patterns, and a Response object that's easy to inspect. This lesson covers the day-to-day API: the verb functions, parameters, response inspection, sessions, auth, timeouts, retries, and where the modern alternative httpx fits in.