The book is a concise, self-contained and fully updated introduction to automata theory - a fundamental topic of computer sciences and engineering. The material is presented in a rigorous yet convincing way and is supplied with a wealth of examples, exercises and down-to-the earth convincing explanatory notes. An ideal text to a spectrum of one-term courses in computer sciences, both at the senior undergraduate and graduate students.

• Foreword
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Preliminaries
• Part I: Grammars and generating languages
• 2 Regular expressions and regular languages
• 3 Context-free grammars
• 4 Context-sensitive grammars and unrestricted grammars
• Part II: Automata and accepting languages
• 5 Turing machines
• 6 Pushdown automata
• 7 Finite automata
• Part III: Revisited: languages, grammars, automata
• 8 Grammars versus automata
• 9 Around the hierarchy of languages
• Bibliography
• Index