Python beginner: Downloading a pdf file from a web server on VMS.

[DoggyKennel]

I am asking this as much to get an idea of what Python is capable of
and how one goes about things in python rather than just solving the
problem. So any replies about how I should go about it, or if I have
the wrong idea, would be appreciated. 

Basically I want to download a pdf file from a web server and print
it. So I would need a http class that is given a URL and can return
whatever is returned from that URL. Does such a class exist? Would
such a class return the docuemnt as a file handle.

The second part of this is that I would like to do this under VMS. I
am hoping that if a "http" class as I have described above exists and
that it would be built on top of a socket class and could be ported to
any python environment that has a socket class. And that a socket
class is a part of standard python and has been ported to any
environment that python has been ported to. Is that right? I beleive
python has been ported to VMS?
Any advice on how to search for this info would also be appreciated.

I would also be interested in any introduction to Python. I have
looked for this before and the consenus seems to be the tutorials
referenced in python.org. I didn't really find much else. Is there
anything else?
Does anyone know of good overview of Python - things like what it can
do. If everything can be compiled. How portable it is?

Any help gratefully received, Martin