Python Polars: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 3. Moving from Pandas to Polars

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This will be the 3rd chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

There is a good chance that you already have experience with Pandas¹. If you don’t, you can safely skip this chapter. If you do, we encourage you to read this chapter; it will make the rest of the book easier to follow.

In this chapter we want to make sure that your transition from Pandas to Polars is as smooth as possible by highlighting the similarities and, more importantly, the differences between these two packages.

Ever since Polars took off, it has been compared to Pandas. While the comparison is often in favour of Polars, not everybody is equally respectful about this. We cannot abide this. The reason is that data scientists actually owe Pandas a lot. Without Pandas, there would probably be no Polars. We even think it’s safe to say that without Pandas, Python wouldn’t be such a popular language for working with data. We’ll focus on the similarities and differences of these two packages ...