I took it to be a satirical mishmash of end-user complaints and generalized bitching and moaning, pulled largely from a mailing list archive. Regarding the question of whether it was intended as satire, I'd observe that the copy I read so many years ago had a Unix barf bag pasted inside the back cover and I'm pretty sure the front cover featured the guy from Edvard Munch's The Scream.
If it represents an accurate view of something, it represents the fact that Unix at the time had some really eminent end users who found the operating system to be a major pain in the ass. I mean, you can say "those guys should have loved it, they just didn't know what they were talking about," but I don't see the point of it. I guess what I'm saying is that nothing about the book demands to be taken too seriously, and if you see someone doing that, you aren't exactly obligated to also take it seriously (or take them seriously).
If it represents an accurate view of something, it represents the fact that Unix at the time had some really eminent end users who found the operating system to be a major pain in the ass. I mean, you can say "those guys should have loved it, they just didn't know what they were talking about," but I don't see the point of it. I guess what I'm saying is that nothing about the book demands to be taken too seriously, and if you see someone doing that, you aren't exactly obligated to also take it seriously (or take them seriously).