The net::http class is a low-level http client. an instance of the net::http class represents a connection to an http server. the http protocol is described in rfc 2616. the net::http class supports http/1.0 and http/1.1. net::http is a sub-class of io::socket::inet. you can mix its methods with reading and writing from the socket directly. this is not necessarily a good idea, unless you know what you are doing.