To elaborate on this, the original Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, by John Hoffcroft and Jefferey Ullman (The one with the black cover is the 1979 edition). My instructor, even in 2024, made us use that one instead of the newer one.
The other text if i recall right is Tanenbaum's Computer Networks book, where there is a significant portion of bloat that does not really fit there although my source for this is a review for the book.
K&R 2nd Edition was rushed but I personally wouldn't claim the older edition was 'better'.
It would be difficult for the older edition of K&R to be better because it's about a worse dialect of C, which doesn't offer type checking between function declarations and definitions.
I am hazy on the details but my instructor briefly told us that the 1979 edition had better problems and had topics for the advanced undergraduate. The major thing for us as students was that the 1979 was much shorter to use and concise to the point of being a good handbook.
(We do Theory of Computation/Formal Language and Automata Theory as a dual sem course meant to be both a junior and a senior class and thus the 1st edition suits the course better.)
