Compete understanding of encodings and character sets

Can anybody tell me where to find some 开发者_开发知识库clear introduction to character sets, encodings and everything releted to these things? Thanks!

I can think of two articles:

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - the legendary article from our Joel Spolsky.

• Unicode - How to get characters right? - more practical and targeted on Java webdevelopment (as per your question history, you seem to be doing Java webdevelopment).