urlib - to use or not to use ( for web scraping )?

[Larz60+]

In other words maybe reading that book is not the best idea.

I wouldn't judge the book on this, unless very recent and the author is adamant about the urllib thing, you can replace that small portion of code. If the book is older, urllib was the common page fetcher prior to requests, so totally understandable that it would and should have been suggested.

It still works, and can still be used, it's just that there are many more methods available with requests.