Pandas is a powerful open-source Python library for data manipulation and analysis, built on top of NumPy. It provides two primary data structures—Series (1-dimensional) and DataFrame (2-dimensional)—designed for efficient handling of structured data. As of version 3.0 (January 2026), Pandas has introduced Copy-on-Write as the default behavior and uses the new string dtype for text data, both of which improve performance and memory efficiency. The library excels at reading from various file formats, cleaning messy data, and transforming datasets for analysis—making it the go-to tool for data scientists working with tabular data in Python.