The good news is that Fetch is also an incredibly simple library to work with! The syntax for it is simple and clear enough that it should be easy to understand what it does pretty quickly. Of course, that begs the question: what is Fetch?

The short answer is that Fetch is an HTTP request mechanism that has been made a first-class citizen in the Javascript world. The long answer is that Fetch is an attempt by the Javascript community and contributors to handle HTTP requests from Javascript code in a standardized way, instead of the multiple hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of different choices that all require their own implementations, patterns, configurations, and so on.

Fetch’s utility stems from it being ubiquitous and part of the Javascript language standard, although not every browser supports it fully yet. As such, instead of picking some other random library to work with, it is much easier for us to rely instead on the standard, knowing full well that the skills learned as you work with Fetch should transfer just fine into any other libraries that you might pick up and start using.