part igetting started with python you might wonder why python has help mode at all if you can get the same results at the python prompt the answer is convenience it' easier to browse in the help mode in additioneven though you don' do lot of extra typing at the promptyou do perform less typing while in help mode help mode also provides additional helpssuch as by listing commands that you can typeas shown in figure - so you have all kinds of good reasons to enter help mode when you plan to ask python lot of help questions no matter where you ask for helpyou need to observe the correct capitalization of help topics for exampleif you want general information about functionsyou must type help('functions'and not help('functions'or help('functions'when you use the wrong capitalizationpython will tell you that it doesn' know what you mean or that it couldn' find the help topic it won' know to tell you that you used the wrong capitalization someday computers will know what you meant to typerather than what you did typebut that hasn' happened yet closing the command line eventuallyyou want to leave python yesit' hard to believebut people have other things to do besides playing with python all day long you have two standard methods for leaving python and whole bunch of nonstandard methods generallyyou want to use one of the standard methods to ensure that python behaves as you expect it tobut the nonstandard methods work just fine when you simply want to play around with python and not perform any productive work the two standard methods are quit(exit(either of these methods will close the interactive version of python the shell (the python programis designed to allow either command both of these commands can accept an optional argument for exampleyou can type quit( or exit( and press enter to exit the shell the numeric argument sets the command prompt' errorlevel environment variablewhich you can then intercept at the command line or as part of batch file standard practice is to simply use quit(or exit(when nothing has gone wrong with the application to see this way of exiting at workyou must open command prompt or terminal you see prompt type python and press enter to start python you see the python prompt