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

In this article I'll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. All that stuff about "plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits" is not only wrong, it's hopelessly wrong, and if you're still programming that way, you're not much better than a medical doctor who doesn't believe in germs. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.

Very simple, and somewhat Windows-centric (what else would you expect from Joel), but still I'm included to agree with the above sentence.

Also includes this cute .gif of the entire cp437 encoding:

I'd like a T-shirt of that.