Python Polars: The Definitive Guide: Transforming, Analyzing, and Visualizing Data with a Fast and Expressive DataFrame API

by Jeroen Janssens

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 cloudGet a solid understanding of Expressions, the building blocks of every queryHandle complex data types, including text, time, and nested structuresUse both eager and lazy APIs, and know when to use eachVisualize your data with Altair, hvPlot, plotnine, and Great TablesExtend Polars with your own Python functions and Rust pluginsLeverage GPU acceleration to boost performance even further

Genres: Programming, Technical

501 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2025

About the author

Jeroen Janssens, PhD, is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at Posit, PBC. His expertise lies in visualizing data, implementing machine learning models, and building solutions using Python, R, JavaScript, and Bash. He’s passionate about open source and sharing knowledge. He’s the author of Python Polars: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2025) and Data Science at the Command Line (O’Reilly, 2021). Jeroen holds a PhD in machine learning from Tilburg University and an MSc in artificial intelligence from Maastricht University. He lives with his wife and two kids in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Reviews

[Josua Naiborhu]

having spark and pandas knowledge will speed up your learning journey of polars.From theory to the hands-on content have been clearly explained in this book. I highly recommend it for anyone who wanna dive deeper into how polars can help you handle your existing big dataset.