The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

A must for every programmer to read this interesting and entertaining article by Joel Spolsky.

Quote:
"So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html