🚀 go-pugleaf

I would also recommend organizing your drawing into layers. If you read the page in the manual section about layers:
 <http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Layers.html>
that would be really helpful
Its pretty simple and saves a lot of time to have your drawing organized into layers. For example you could have all your foreground shapes on a top layer and all your background designs on a lower layer. Then you can "lock" the background layer so that when you are working on your foreground layer you won't accidentally bump the background objects.
Shift control-L brings up the layer menu. Click on an object and then Shift page-up or shift page down to move that object to a higher or lower level.

Adobe Illustrator is a little faster at this only if you need to move an object many layers higher or many layers lower because in Illustrator you can drag a little dot icon instantly to the layer you want the object to be on but Inkscape only moves an object one layer at a time - but for the most part thats fast enough (Shift control-L is a pretty fast method). Its not a problem and maybe in future versions of Inkscape that might improve.

A good habit is to save your final files in both the native .svg format and then also in the eps format too for better future potential compatibility with other drawing programs. But when working on the Inkscape file work with the .svg format - that is the native format. I was also able to open the resulting Inkscape files in Adobe Illustrator. So the two are interchangeable (which is a critical feature) - except for any type as already mentioned above.

You can also import a photograph which can be a part of your art or used for tracing from - a great feature. For tracing, place the photo on its own layer (first create a new layer and call the layer something like "photo") and then set the photo to about 20% transparency, lock this photo layer (click on its little lock icon in the layer menu) and start tracing. Very nice - just like Illustrator.

Any object can be set to any amount of transparency. Transparency is a control at the bottom left of document window.

I haven't tried this yet but this is also a nice feature:
autotracing:
 <http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Trace.html>

OK, that concludes my test drive of Inkscape for now. Its been interesting and I might give it a try on an actual job in the future.