This reminds me of kids buying surrogate books with short description of "Peace and War" and other lengthy literature pieces because they don't want or don't ha

This reminds me of kids buying surrogate books with short description of "Peace and War" and other lengthy literature pieces because they don't want or don't have time to read the original. I personally think the first and the only mandatory thing one should read about Unicode is the Standard itself. Don't read "UTF-8 is cool!!!" blog posts. Don't read RFC 3629. Read original. http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/UnicodeStandard-6.1.pdf http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/UnicodeStandard... It is nicely written, it has normative definitions (code points, glyphs et al). It describes BOM (which Joel On Software apparently has failed to understand). It describes UTF-8 error handling and normalization and many necessarily non-trivial things.