An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata

I rented this textbook for my 4000 level Advanced Discrete course. The book is horrible and littered with errors. The topics are poorly expanded on and sometimes assume prior knowledge not covered in the book.

Exercises in edition 6 are just minor modifications and additions on edition 5, but the solutions don’t always seem congruent with the exercises. My instructor has found errors in both the exercises and solutions.

Because of copyright issues I cannot post images of the contents of this book but let me tell you something. This book is an INTRO to a "complex" topic which is mostly abstract which is usually taught in the Junior or Senior year of Computer Science. However the book doesn't explain things very well. There's more than 100 mentions of the word "clear or clearly" and 62 mentions of the word "Obvious". Remember the book is only around 400 pages. Therefore there's a "clear" or "obvious" statement every 2.6 pages. Every time there is such expression some example is NOT shown or provided to the reader. There is many... MANY instances the author says something is SO OBVIOUS that the example will NOT be provided. Instead the author leaves the conclusion of the examples as an exercise . WHAT!? The book that is supposed to show you how things works leaves you stuck mid-definition. I have at least 10 screenshots of such instances but I cannot post them. Remember, each of these occurrences is a full section that is INCOMPLETE due the author's lack of knowledge. I do not recommend this book at all. If you are going to study this content YouTube will serve you better..

You'd probably be able to solve only 10/60 problems per chapter, if you only depend on the text of this book. I don't understand why would they even include problems that are not explained within their text.

I had been in class for half a month before I got the book.

Excellent!

A little be old, and have some notes inside!
But I think it’s ok

Good! Very good! Extremely good!

I picked up this book because I could not completely follow pump lemma of NFA talked about in Michael Sipser's "Introduction to the theory of Computation".
My initial goal is to finish up to CFG yet ended up reading all the way to the end.
I really enjoyed reading this book as it has explained many tricky things very clearly and put a focus on intuitive understanding.
Rigorous mathematic derivation is no longer the goal and gives way to insights and big picture.
Examples are abundant and easy to follow and revealing.

I personally believe this is how pedagogical is all about - reveal the ideas, show the vision, and point out the direction to go, even if it is hazy and winding.

This is one of the best books I have read and I cannot emphasize the importance of gaining a good understand of automata. It is the bedrock of theory of computation, programming language, compiler etc.

Hope you will enjoy the book just as I do!

Needed this text book for an engineering graduate class. It’s old but had some good information.

Sometimes it has excellent explanations but most of the time... It is just ok.