The Wolfram System provides a uniquely powerful interactive environment for building up arbitrarily complex computations, under convenient interactive or programmatic control.

Components of the Wolfram System

Kernel — core computational engine

Front end — notebook interface system

Executing Computations

— evaluate input

— evaluate selection in place

expr; — evaluate expression, but do not print the result

(= at beginning of input) — use free-form linguistic input

Session History »

% — most recent output expression (%%, %%%, ... for earlier outputs)

%n — n ^th output expression

— copy down an input line (Insert ▶ Input from Above)

Getting Help

— bring up help about a function

?name — give information about functions, symbols, etc.

Aborting

— abort a running calculation (Evaluation ▶ Abort Evaluation)

Evaluation ▶ Quit Kernel — quit the kernel, keeping the front end running

Messages »

Off — switch off a message or a group of messages

Quiet — run a computation "quietly" without outputting messages

Why the Beep?  ▪  Why the Coloring?

Session Information »

Directory — current directory

Names — names of known symbols

Notebooks  ▪  MemoryInUse  ▪  SystemInformation  ▪  DateString  ▪  ...

Session Customization »

Edit ▶ Preferences — set global front end preferences

Format ▶ Stylesheet — pick the stylesheet for a notebook

Format ▶ Option Inspector — set options for notebooks

$Post  ▪  $Path  ▪  $CharacterEncoding  ▪  $TimeZone  ▪  $RecursionLimit  ▪  ...

Kernels & Contexts

Evaluation ▶ Kernel Configuration Options — set up additional local or remote kernels

Evaluation ▶ Notebook's Kernel — choose the kernel to connect to

Evaluation ▶ Notebook's Default Context — define scope of symbols