running a Linux command in the background

I'm working on my Python lesson plans and updating my Python modules.  Thought I would post about what I needed to check today...

I wanted to run the IDLE3 python interpreter from the command line in the terminal.  If I just type:
$ idle3 
then it does launch the IDEL3 python interpreter, but it does not release the terminal, so you want to run the command in the background by typing:
$idle3 &
The & tells the terminal to run the process in the background and your terminal is then released to be able to execute other commands with out waiting for the idel3 process to terminate.