Rating: 
Summary: Poor explination coupled with insufficient examples
Review: This book is a poor choice for the student who does NOT already know the bulk of this material. The authors claim to make this material open to the undergraduate with "no special mathematical experience", however they have done little to achieve this goal. Instead, we have brief introductions to specific topics, lengthy proofs of already established theories, and little to help the student in their efforts on the advanced problems. To compound this misjudgement, there are no solutions, partial or full, nor hints to the problems, as many qualified books provide. The unfortunate part is that misguided professors will choose this book based on its title and claims, not its shotty content.
Rating: 
Summary: Read the Title
Review: This book is about the theory of Computation, as the title says. Some people have argued that this is not for beginners, etc, but what the hack do you mean by that? If you have proper mathematical background, as you should for studying abstract model of computation, this book is much better reading than the white book by Ullman and Hopcroft. Otherwise why bother reading titles like this? If you are expecting something similar to "teaching yourself whatever in 21 seconds", see elsewhere. By the way, ... on the cover is Alan Turing, the father of computation. And he's an English, not from Germany.
Rating:
Summary: Not exceedingly exciting, but overall good introduction
Review: This book is an introduction to the theory of computation. It covers finite automata, context-free grammars, turing machines and Church's thesis, the halting problem, NP-completeness, and first-order logic. For something covering such fascinating topics, the book is surprisingly dull. Instead of starting and or ending each chapter with inspiring overviews/reviews of the consequences of all the fun theorems proven, it goes straight to detail, always failing to create the enthusiasm this subject deserves. An obvious omission is a listing of all the funny squiggly symbols in the index, if you have forgotten the authors notation a few years later. On the positive side, the proofs in the book are remarkably clear, and most of the exercises are about proving additional theorems, so the reader will get a lot of exercise in reading and writing proofs. Combined with an inspiring lecturer the book can be a big win, but if you are just doing this for fun, Papadimitrou's book "Computational Complexity" will be much better.
Rating:
Summary: Good books are understood by all.
Review: This book is good in the fact that it covers a lot of subject matter thoroughly. Unfortunately, many students, like myself, simply find this book to be boring in presentation. Personally, I think, how can someone not love this subject? It is incredibly interesting and its study answers so many questions relating to the possibilities and limitations of computers. However, this book does not keep students interested.
Rating:
Summary: The worst book written for students
Review: This is one of the worst book written for students I have ever seen. With extremely hard to understand, insufficient explanations, I am wondering whom would be the target readers, professors or students? Unfortunately, a lot of schools were misguided to use this book simply because of the reputation of the schools where the authors work for, not the content of the book!
Rating: 
Summary: Not recommended
Review: This text gives a rigorous treatment of the the theory of computation however it simply lacks creative presentation. To put it in laymans terms, it is simply boring. I liken the reading of this text to having a root canal performed. I simply cannot believe how effective this text is at killing the excitment I got from reading on this subject the first time. As with any subject, if it is presented well, virtually anyone can "get it" provided a little thinking is applied. This book's authors cover the necessary subject matter but, in my opinion, simply do not teach it well and therefore do not inspire.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: This was one of my favorite college texts. I was a Physics/Math major. The basic question that this book attempts to answer is, what does it mean to compute something, and how do we formalize the answer mathematically. This may sound like a boring question, but it ultimately leads us to answer certain other important questions, such as, is the answer to a given problem computable, that is, is it even possible to design an algorithm to find the answer to a given question. The answer is not always yes. There are questions that cannot be answered by a computer. As one might suspect, this can be very philosophical, if there are questions that a computer cannot answer, what does that mean for artificial intelligence? The book doesnt pose these philosophical questions, it only does the math and leaves the speculation aside (see Godel Escher Bach for a more philosophical treatment)
As one of the other reviewers pointed out, this is not a book on algorithms, and it wont teach you anything about programming, but it will introduce you to a rich area of mathematics/computer science. And in that sense, it succeeds. (Please note, it does require a level of mathematical sophistication to be able to read and do proofs, but it is one of the easier treatments on this subject that Ive seen. If you want to see the real hardcore stuff, take a look at recursion theory texts.)
Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Book on tough topic
Review: This was one of my favorite textbooks from college. In fact, I still have it on my shelf. It is a fantastic textbook, attemtping to introduce the Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science, in essence the science. In covering this, it moves into topics such as Finite Automata, Parsing, and Turing Machines. I feel the negative reviews are due to some confusion. This is not an algorithms book, or a programming book, or an "intro to AI" book. It's a Math textbook. It's language is one of theorems and proofs, and this would be hard going for someone not comfortable with a college-level abstract mathematics background. For those of you who have such a background, this book covers a topic where mathematics can become elegant. A physics major friend of mine fell in love with it, and he had no interest in Comp Sci!! For it's topic, a similar book would be Feynman's lecture notes on Physics. Both those volumes and this book were attempt to bring the highest levels of theory within the field to the undergraduate audience. Both succeed.
Rating:
Summary: Just plain boring.
Review: When I first signed up for the theory of computation I expected it to be a great class. I had looked over some of the subject material before the course started and it found it very interesting. I mean, who can't find this subject interesting? Learning about not only how computers function but what their limitations are. I'll tell you who, anyone who has had the misfortune of reading this book. I don't know how or why two obviously educated people can write a book that is so lackluster. This book turned my course into an absolute nightmare. I instead turned to another book, which ended up saving me. Do yourself a favor and run from this book as fast as you can.
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