Baker has a very nice control console that can probably do more than you ever will really need it to do. It was acquired with both theater and parties in mind so there are features like the chaser which you will probably not use unless you are using it for a party.
I will give a brief description of what all of the bits of the control panel do, but really (as you might expect) the best way to find out what it is capable of is to just play with all of the switches, buttons, etc. until you figure out what they all do and how they interact with each other. You don't even need to have the lighting system set up to do this since there is a little LED at the top of every column on the board which indicates how bright the light would be if things were hooked up.
The board is split into 4 main functional groups, master control on the left, then on the right from top to bottom: scene X, scene Y, and Patch. The master controls affect which of the groups on the left have control at any time. The controls consist of a blackout switch, a master fader, an independent fader (I), a matched pair of faders for going smoothly between X and Y, and a bunch of random less important master controls.
Scene X and Y are basically identical. They consist of 24 faders for each of the individual 24 channels that the board can control. The idea is to have something set up on either X or Y, and then be changing the other while the action is going on stage. This way you are ready when a change comes and can just use the paired faders to switch from one to the other all at once. The only thing which is on X and not Y are little switches near those LED's I mentioned earlier. These switches allow you to take a channel completely offline, put it solely in the control of the independent master (I), or finally let it be like a normal X or Y scene channel (setting M,A,B, or C). A,B, or C refer to the sub-masters you find on the left of the X and Y groups which allow you to group large numbers of channels together and treat them all as one. The other thing you will find are a number of dime shaped buttons under each channel, these are ``bump'' buttons and work to bring one light up to full power while the button is pressed.
The last section on the bottom is separate from the X and Y scene masters and is labeled P for patch. The way it works is by associating one or more channels with a patch channel through the patch board found at the far right bottom corner. You can stick the pins into the appropriate holes to make the associations and even associate any given channel with more than one patch channel. Patch channels 1 through 6 can be set to cycle repeatedly on and off in a pattern (chase) by pressing the final button in the far far bottom right corner of the board.