You can browse a few pages of the Simon book at this link supplied in the OP's comments section[1]. It actually looks like a highly readable intro to automata theory, and much more enjoyable than Hopcroft and Ullman's book Introduction to Automata, Languages, and Computation that the OP himself recommends in his comments. I found Hopcroft and Ullman to be a dull, formal proof-based approach with few of the practical examples that one needs to get an intuitive feel for a subject. The Simon book might be a bit of the opposite--too many practical examples and not enough theory--but, hey, I would have preferred that over Hopcroft and Ullman (or in addition to it).

Many of OP's objections come off as petty, like "the author uses the capital letter "X" to represent ×, the cross product symbol." Come on, really? I think the OP's real reason for hating the book was the strange quotes Simon used; it was a bad decision for Simon to use those quotes even if he had absolutely no political agenda, because someone somewhere is going to take it the wrong way, and academia being the leading edge of the politically correct movement is especially dangerous.

[1] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=ht...