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I'll be teaching a standard undergraduate class on languages and automata next semester, and would prefer to use a legitimate free or low-cost text. Any suggestions?

I love the Sipser text but the latest edition costs $196, which is hard to say with a straight face in the age of free courses.

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4 Answers 4

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Maheshwari and Smid's Introduction to Theory of Computation is free, with a Creative Commons license. It has some computability and complexity theory as well but seems to be primarily on languages and automata.

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks! I will probably use this as the main text, augmented with the Fleck & Har-Peled lecture notes. $\endgroup$
    – Kevin A. Wortman
    Commented Oct 3, 2012 at 21:51
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Models of Computation — Exploring the Power of Computing by John E. Savage (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license).

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There are class notes online. For example... http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/teach/notes/373/

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I totally recommend the draft of a book Mathematical Foundations of Automata Theory by Jean-Eric Pin. Also, you should check his home page for more automata related stuff. Note however that this books is oriented to semigroup-theory, so it depends on what you want to teach to your students.

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    $\begingroup$ That's hardly an introductory text. $\endgroup$
    – Dave Clarke
    Commented Oct 3, 2012 at 8:19
  • $\begingroup$ Yeah, that looks like a fine text, but my target audience doesn't generally have any abstract algebra background. $\endgroup$
    – Kevin A. Wortman
    Commented Oct 4, 2012 at 0:37

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