About as famous as they come in the python community. It is the perfect example of a library done right. I've yet to meet a developer who have used it that dislike it.

It handles all of the low level stuff for you, such as sessions, cookies, gzip, form encoding POSTs, composing URLs with arguments, thread safety etc. etc. without you even having to be aware of them, all in a terse and more readable format. It does it without taking the ability away to control those if you really want to, not that you're likely to need to anyway.

Take a look at the two examples here, one using the standard library for http, urllib2, and the other using requests: https://gist.github.com/kennethreitz/973705

I want requests to exist in pretty much every language. The API is clean and simple and perfectly expressive.