| # (Not So) Advanced | |
| While the "Advanced" title might sound daunting and you might be tempted to skip this chapter, in fact, some of the most interesting and powerful features can be found here. | |
| Besides the built-in commands, Nushell has a [standard library](standard_library.md). | |
| Nushell operates on _structured data_. | |
| You could say that Nushell is a "data-first" shell and a programming language. | |
| To further explore the data-centric direction, Nushell includes a full-featured dataframe processing engine using [Polars](https://github.com/pola-rs/polars) as the backend. | |
| Make sure to check the [Dataframes documentation](dataframes.md) if you want to process large data efficiently directly in your shell. | |
| Values in Nushell contain some extra [metadata](metadata.md). | |
| This metadata can be used, for example, to [create custom errors](creating_errors.md). | |
| Thanks to Nushell's strict scoping rules, it is very easy to [iterate over collections in parallel](parallelism.md) which can help you speed up long-running scripts by just typing a few characters. | |
| You can [interactively explore data](explore.md) with the [`explore`](/commands/docs/explore.md) command. | |
| Finally, you can extend Nushell's functionality with [plugins](plugins.md). | |
| Almost anything can be a plugin as long as it communicates with Nushell in a protocol that Nushell understands. | |