This volume presents the lecture notes from the authors' three summer courses offered during the program "Automorphisms of Free Groups: Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics," held at the Centre de Recerca Matematica (CRM) in Bellaterra, Spain.

The first two chapters present the basic tools needed, from formal language theory (regular and context-free languages, automata, rewriting systems, transducers, etc) and emphasize their connections to group theory, mostly relating to free and virtually-free groups. The material covered is sufficient to present full proofs of many of the...