http-fetcher is a small, robust, flexible library for downloading files via HTTP using the GET method.
It's easy to use, but it also allows you to customize and manipulate your file requests through altering the User Agent, Referer, timeout, etc.  The error reporting functions give you a simple, clean interface through which to obtain information about a problem.

  There are other libraries that handle HTTP requests, but are generally more complex to use and are focused on different goals.  http-fetcher is designed to let you retrieve files via HTTP quickly and easily without having to reinvent the wheel.  From this base you can build interactive download tools (like lfetch), site mirroring tools, web spiders, anything with a need to do HTTP GETs.

  For a list of other free HTTP (and FTP) client libraries, check out this page on the cURL project's website.