Client libraries can be helpful and sometimes reduce a lot of plumbing/boilerplate that you would end up writing on your own (eg: authentication, paging). Most

Client libraries can be helpful and sometimes reduce a lot of plumbing/boilerplate that you would end up writing on your own (eg: authentication, paging). Most environments -- Ruby, Python, PHP -- have minimal HTTP clients in standard libraries however they all have capable third-party libraries. Unirest as you mention, but also Requests for Python or Guzzle for PHP. Product-specific clients generally build on these third-party libraries or go with the standard libraries instead. The product-specific clients generally offer more comprehensive error handling, for example if an API relies on arcane error codes that wouldn't immediately be obvious to an end-user.