List of intro TCS books for those who don't know much about TCS If you have to recommend books for someone who wants to learn more about TCS at the introductory level such as automata theory, algorithmics, complexity theory, etc, what book(s) would you recommend for those who are interested and want to learn more about TCS, but not had any exposure to it?
If you would like to have a general introduction without getting to deep into the technical details, I suggest David Harel's Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing. After that, this is my favorite list:


Michael Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation: the best introduction to automata theory, computability and complexity.
Algorithms by  S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani: the most intuitive introduction to algorithms with stronger focus on intuition than technical proofs.
Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls: this is not a textbook on algorithms, but it demonstrates beautifully how to use algorithm design techniques to solve real problems that irritated real programmers. :-) This might be a good start if you have some pre-knowledge on programming.