UPDATED 8/27/2014 to expand, clarify and expound certain concepts better
If you haven’t already read the excellent article by Joel Spolsky entitled, “ The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) “, then you definitely should. However, I think it makes a lot more sense if you understand a few basics first. If you’re like me, I still didn’t quite “get it” after reading through that article the first time or two.
For many years I was always confused by the whole mess. I didn’t understand exactly what Unicode is or what character encodings are all about or what the big deal was with UTF-8. Turns out it’s all pretty simple (sort of). I won’t dive into the history since Joel covers that pretty well in his article and I’m not nearly as qualified. Instead, I’ll just try to explain the basics as simply as I can.