All of the examples in this chapter were written using the notebook interface. I highly recommend using the notebook for performing symbolic calculations. The show function (or method) generates nicely formatted output that is much easier to read than the text representation that you get on the command line.
Tip
Calling Maxima directly
Sage uses Maxima
, an open-source computer algebra system, to handle many symbolic calculations. You can interact directly with Maxima from a Sage worksheet or the interactive shell by using the maxima object. For a complete tutorial with many examples, see http://www.sagemath.org/doc/reference/sage/interfaces/maxima.html.