How does it happen in the books? I'm assuming it's a lot more "shocking"/gory?
You could argue that it's more gory, since instead of blowing the station, he leads an assault with a company of space marines. He has orders to retake the station for the corp. that owns it, not to blow an expensive piece of infrastructure to bits. His marines kill every defender they encounter during the retaking and manage to damage the air recyclers during the battle, leading to the asphyxiation of all the civilians hidden in their rooms on the station. Which he blames on those stubborn defenders, if they didn't force him to blow their barricades, maybe the station would have survived.
The thing is, the entire presentation is punctuated with his talks with the rear echelon, and notably the negotiation team who explicitly tell him that negotiations have failed and he's now a go for assault. So he goes. And finds out the jammed broadcast (which is basically mostly what we see in the show) about how they were trying to surrender all the time, which he flatly contradicts what he was told.
The bit with Naomi saying that men with ideals are dangerous? He resigns very publicly after his superiors congratulate him for making even a bigger example than they expected to and are probably going to award him the biggest medal they have, and he can expect to be a general soon. And pubwalk around Ceres trying to get killed by the Belters for his actions. And then Anderson Dawes (the OPA guy Miller talks to all the time), who is named after the Anderson Station (his parents were working for the same corp and were not very original) tells him that if he gets himself killed over this, then the guy and his little brain-damaged girl have died for nothing and it's a waste (Belters don't like waste).
Now, the contrast between the original "butcher" of Anderson Station and the show's is so absurd, I'm half expecting that the record will be set straight in a further episode (if that's so, not the next one, but probably prior to the assault of Toth Station near the end). But the entire exposition, dragged over the entire episode, is - IMHO - completely botched, because if they separate the "he kills everyone" and then, episode later "but he didn't know!" it will feel extremely artificial.