The book concerns the frustrations of users to the Unix operating system. Many users had come from systems that they felt were far more sophisticated in computer science terms, and were tremendously frustrated by the worse is better design philosophy that they felt Unix and much of its software encapsulated.

This book was printed as a trade paperback. Its front cover was designed to be similar to The Scream. An air sickness bag, printed with the phrase “UNIX barf bag”, was inserted into the inside back cover of every copy, by the publisher. (From Wikipedia.org)