This is my favorite introductory book on algorithms. It's very well-written, concise, and develops important concepts through problems. It also strikes a nice balance in presenting real mathematical content without beating you over the head with formality.
No, she's facing the right way - it's a music lesson, so she's facing the instrument which she's playing. But she's looking slightly towards the (I assume) teacher, as if asking "Am I doing this right?". On Tim's version, she has abandoned the instrument completely and is just talking to the gentleman, who is also much more engaged with her judging by the body postrue - I'd say even there's something else than music lesson going on in that version :) So these paintings, while being similar, actually depict two quite different situations.
It looks to me that their heads are pointing in about the same direction (looking at the man) but in Vermeer's she is turning her head (her body is facing another direction)
The site maintainer for the 1988 verion, Paul Dourish, gives a counterargument in his preface ('...Unfortunately, in the process, [Raymond] essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing; and third, by adding in all sorts of terms which are "jargon" only in the sense that they're technical...'). At the very least, the 1988 version is livelier.
For more amusing grumpiness, see The Unix Hater's Handbook:
Download it and, in the first half of the (long) archive, you will find the users raising holy hell at Eric S. Raymond for what he was doing to the Jargon File at the time.
Raymond had changed the anti-Unix jokes, substituting MS-DOS for Unix in each case. The users of the mailing list would have been happy with Raymond coming up with original anti-Microsoft jokes, but were justifiably angry at Raymond for re-writing history.
I don't have quite as bad an opinion of Eric S. Raymond as do some people around here. In particular, his idea of Kafka trapping is insightful ( http://0-esr.ibiblio.org.librus.hccs.edu/?p=2122 ). I do note the irony of a libertarian who gripes at the distortions of the mainstream media having done a bit of media distortion of his own.
I'm torn, because while ESR did add a lot of emphasis on Unix/C culture (which is very important in hacker history), the last five or ten years he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.
Some of the claims made about Ada are certainly mistaken, but there are also good arguments for genuine, important contributions. See, for example, Babbage historian Doron Swade's discussion of her insight into potential applications of the Analytical Engine beyond numeric calculation (beginning at 36:30):
