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What are some good resources for practice problems on formal languages? Every textbook I've seen contains few practice problems with even fewer answers. I would like a resource that has questions with varying degrees of difficulty, not just one really hard problem. For example if you learn about the pumping lemma, how do you get good at using it? Even a google search for practice problems with solutions doesn't return much.

Are there tools that can be used to check one's answers, for example given a regular expression it produces the DFA/NFA etc?

I'm using "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" and I personally found it hard to use: the layout is all over the place and there weren't enough questions with answers.

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  • $\begingroup$ Fair warning: Book recommendations sometimes don't work very well here. Your question about how to check your answer is a great question, though. One way is to construct a proof of correctness for your DFA/NFA. For more on how to do that, see cs.stackexchange.com/q/11315/755. This can get a bit tedious, though. $\endgroup$
    – D.W. ♦
    Dec 7, 2015 at 19:36
  • $\begingroup$ @D.W., unfortunate, I was looking for something like this stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/… $\endgroup$
    – Celeritas
    Dec 7, 2015 at 19:43
  • $\begingroup$ That question was asked 6 years ago. Standards have changed since then. That's why that post is locked. In any case, that post is not useful precedent. See also meta.stackoverflow.com/q/290701/781723, blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers, meta.cs.stackexchange.com/q/20, and meta.cs.stackexchange.com/q/145 if you'd like to learn more about the policy in this area. $\endgroup$
    – D.W. ♦
    Dec 7, 2015 at 19:47
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    $\begingroup$ One book with quite a lot of practice problems (and answers : ) ) is Peter Linz's book "An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata". Based on the Amazon reviews however…you might want to have a look at it yourself before fully committing to it… $\endgroup$
    – MonadBoy
    Dec 7, 2015 at 21:19

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