Unicode

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.

This quote from the Web Site of the Unicode Consortium pretty good describes the intention of Unicode, which is also published as ISO/IEC 10646.

• http://www.unicode.org the Unicode Consortium, keeper of the codes
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode The Unicode Topic Page on Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
• http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html Markus Kuhn's UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ (for Linux)
• http://www.icu-project.org/ The International Components for Unicode (ICU) libraries

Articles

• Unicode for Programmers by Jason Orendorff,
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (Joel on Software)
• IT Blog: Unicode in Java 1.5 (german Blog article by Bernd Eckenfels)
• Markus Scherer's Introduction to code pages and Unicode IBM developerWorks

Discussion about Unicode