[.ca] An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata (ISBN 0763714224)

for the brainy one:
Lot of review didn't like this book simply because it was "confusing", well this subject is inherently confused. I had to use this book for one of my course, and to my opinion is it a good book, it does a good job of explaining the concept, providing enough proof but not to the point that it bogged down the reader. If you put some effort in and actually think about all the concept/algorithm, you will like it much better, to those that couldn't understand this book, get a new major, i don't think your brain is fit for CS or any engineering major, may i suggest liberal art? or some type of social sci?

Simply godawful:
I had to purchase this for my school's Intro to CS Theory course. Linz' utter ineptitude towards writing is what gives this book 1 star. Examples throughout chapters are sparse and relatively worthless. Sample problems at the end of the chapter, in contrast, are ridiculously difficult, and the solutions in the back don't offer any explanation whatsoever towards the answers. This is the only book I have ever read that actually made me feel dumber for reading it. It's simply demeaning. Rather than explaining or justifying his logic, as he should to the target audience of this book, he simply uses "it's obvious that..." repeatedly for sample problems and solutions. A ridiculously complex problem's solution in the back of the book will be whittled down to two lines at best, half of which says something along the line of "It's blatantly obvious that the answer is ___, and you're stupid for not realizing it." If you're actually assigned graded work from this book, may god have mercy on your soul.

Not a good book:
First off, let me say this book did not confuse me. It's just very poorly written. If this was the only Automata book I ever read, my review would not mean as much. On the contrary, I have read 4-5 Automata books and have taught the topic numerous times. I urge teachers and students to avoid this book. If you would like a great book covering this material, get Dexter Kozen's Automata and Computability. That book is so well written and elegant that it puts most of the other books to shame. It is one of the top CS books on my list along with SICP, CLRS, and a few others. In addition, the "OLD" version of Hopcroft and Ullman is pretty good but the newer version with Motwani is bad. Anyways, I hope this helps some of you who are looking for a good book to read.

Boring subject:
This subject is confusing in general, I have this professor and he's really confusing, but when I read his own book it's actually better that him.

A good introduction to a difficult topic:
Peter Linz's "An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata" does a pretty good job at what the title implies: providing introductory explanations of the field of formal languages and automata. By its nature, some of the concepts in this field are fairly obscure and to follow their power or relevance requires some mathematical training and rigor. (Translation: this stuff can be hard to grasp at first, particularly for students who are not experienced or comfortable with proof-based mathematical discussions.) Being a graduate student, I had the benefit of having significantly more math experience than the undergraduates who typically encounter this material for the first time, so my review may be a little biased towards those with more mathematical training than people likely to be using this book. In general, the book is clearly written and, while there are a number of errors dotted throughout the text, Peter Linz happily accepts corrections to be integrated into later versions of the book. In the course of reading the book, I found about a dozen errors, with a large concentration of them in Chapter 9.1's introduction to Turing Machines. This text was the required book for an introductory computer science course at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Fall 2002. I used it in conjunction with Michael Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation", reading the relevant sections of Sipser's book after reading the introductions provided by Linz. I found Linz to be useful for introducing ideas, but generally lacking in the rigor to drive the point home with mathematical precision. Many times I found Sipser could say more precisely in two pages what Linz did in ten. However, the copious examples and explanation provided by Linz are useful for providing a context for the material being introduced. I think it would be difficult to try to learn directly from Sipser as the presentation there is pretty dense. The combination of the two books served me well in the course. I was disappointed in the last two chapters of the book, however, which lacked much explanation and spent a lot of time hand-waving. The message of the last two chapters seemed to be "anything that interests you here is beyond the scope of this book." As a result, the chapters probably could have been omitted or replaced with a paragraph that says, "if you want to learn more, read the books listed on page 405." Bearing in mind that Linz's book is, after all, an introductory text, the lack of rigor can be excused. I found the book thoroughly readable and learned quite a bit of introductory computer science by reading it. I would recommend it to anyone else who is interested in learning a little bit about basic theoretical computer science.