The book was edited by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise and Steven Strassmann and published in 1994.

The book is based on messages sent to the UNIX-HATERS mailing list between 1988 and 1993, and contains a foreword by the human factors guru Don Norman and an "anti-foreword" by Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of the operating system.

Many of the book's complaints about the Unix operating system are based on design decisions and anomalies in the command-line interface.

", referring to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the creators of Unix.

[1] Later reviewers[2] of the book have noted that some issues were resolved in the future, such as the development of the ext2 filesystem addressing the discussed lack of block storage.