An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata, Third Edition provides an excellent presentation of the material that is essential to an introductory theory of computation course. This third edition text has been praised for the straightforward explanations of complicated ideas and the solid mathematical base it provides. The author offers an intuitive motivation for proofs and avoids excessive mathematical detail, so that students can focus on and understand the underlying principles. Many carefully chosen examples are repeated in several contexts, which enable students to build understanding through comparative study.

• Straightforward explanations of complicated concepts. Exercise sets with a wide range of difficulty.

Preliminaries / Finite Automata and Regular Expressions / Properties of Regular Sets / Context-Free Grammars / Pushdown Automata / Properties of Context-Free Languages / Turing Machines / Undecidability / The Shomsky Hierarchy / Deterministic Context-Free Languages / Closure Properties of Families of Languages / Computational Complexity Theory / Intractable Problems / Highlights of other Important Language Classes / Bibliography / Index.

Undergraduate and Postgraduate students.