Unlock the power of Polars, a Python package for transforming, analyzing, and visualizing data. In this hands-on guide, Jeroen Janssens and Thijs Nieuwdorp walk you through every feature of Polars, showing you how to use it for real-world tasks like data wrangling, exploratory data analysis, building pipelines, and more.

Whether you're a seasoned data professional or new to data science, you'll quickly master Polars' expressive API and its underlying concepts. You don't need to have experience with pandas, but if you do, this book will help you make a seamless transition. The many practical examples and real-world datasets are available on GitHub, so you can easily follow along.

• Process data from CSV, Parquet, spreadsheets, databases, and the cloud
• Get a solid understanding of Expressions, the building blocks of every query
• Handle complex data types, including text, time, and nested structures
• Use both eager and lazy APIs, and know when to use each
• Visualize your data with Altair, hvPlot, plotnine, and Great Tables
• Extend Polars with your own Python functions and Rust plugins
• Leverage GPU acceleration to boost performance even further