Cinderella Book

/sin-də-ˈre-lə bu̇k/

[CMU]

n. 'Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation', by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman, (Addison-Wesley, 1979). 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. The back cover depicts the girl with the device in shambles after she has pulled on the rope.