I thereby propose the following course of study:
- Read "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)", by Joel Spolsky
- Read "There Ain't No Such Thing as Plain Text", by Jeff Atwood
- Read "On the Goodness of Unicode", by Tim Bray
- Read the aforementioned Wikipedia article on Unicode
- Perl programmers, read: "Unicode-processing issues in Perl and how to cope with it", by Ivan Kurmanov
- Write a UTF-8 version of "Hello, World!" in each programming language that you ordinarily use. (See below.)
Speaking of which, wanna know how to say "Hello, world!" in a wide variety of natural languages? Here's the list, with the language names omitted. See how many you can identify, and brag in the comments how awesome you are!
- Hello, World!
- 世界、こんにちは！
- مرحبا ، العالم!
- 你好，世界！
- Bonjour, le monde!
- Hallo, welt!
- Ciao, mondo!
- 안녕하세요, 세계!
- Olá, mundo!
- Здравствуй, мир!
- Здравей, свят!
- Hola, mundo!
- Halló, Heimur!
