The Jargon File records the book's nickname, Cinderella Book, thusly: "So called because the cover depicts a girl (putatively Cinderella) sitting in front of a Rube Goldberg device and holding a rope coming out of it.

Forming a basis both for the creation of courses on the topic, as well as for further research, that book shaped the field of automata theory for over a decade, cf.

The first edition in turn constituted a major revision of a previous textbook also written by Hopcroft and Ullman, entitled Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata.

Compared with the forerunner book, the 1979 edition was expanded, and the material was reworked to make it more accessible to students, cf.

As Hopcroft reports on feedback to the overhauled 1979 edition: "It seems that our attempts to lower the level of our presentation for the benefit of students by including more detail and explanations had an adverse effect on the faculty, who then had to sift through the added material to outline and prepare their lectures" (Hopcroft 1989).