The scale, rotate, reflect, and shear tools all work in the same way. To rotate an object, select then click rotate tool. To perform a rotation, reflection, and shearing, you need to position the mouse pointer a fair distance away from the origin point. Then, you click and drag in a circular motion. The farther away you move your pointer from the origin point before dragging, the more leverage and control you will have. Invert is not included in the fundamental transformation tools.
In adobe illustrator, transformation tools are used change different parameters of a selected object. Rotate, scale and reflect are part of the transformation tools.
The rotate tool which looks like a small circular arrow, it is used to rotate the selected object depending on the reference pointed by clicking in the needed place before rotating.
The scale tool which looks like a small rectangle, by dragging the bounding box you can scale a selected object.
The reflect tool looks like a small mirrored triangle, to reflect a selected object, drag the object to the needed direction.