As Tim says, ipython is a superset of the regular python shell, so you can ignore all the features and get along with it just fine. The features I find most useful (and which I think will be of benefit to the dojo) are context-sensitive tab completion and the help system. Using these is an order of magnitude faster than looking things up in the docs and works for any modules or objects that ipython can see. It also has a bunch of built-in commands such as 'cd', 'ls', 'rm', 'cp' etc for accessing the filesystem, 'time' and 'timeit' for timing fragments of code, 'run' to execute a file in the namespace of the interactive session, 'ed' to edit text in a text editor and execute the code as if it was typed at the prompt, and many more. Dave