Alright, I admit it, I had never really understood character sets until recently (gasp!!). Let's face it, learning to be an international superstar developer is hard enough without having to worry about big/little endian or ASCII / Unicode. This was always a badge of shame until I had a good friend Bob Wallace help me realize that it is not such a daunting subject. Scott Hanselman recently had his 26th podcast on getting an app ready for globalization/localization. The podcast located here is definitely worth the listen. One of the links on the post is a link to an article that Joel Spolsky wrote some time ago. I wish I had read it back when it was written as it would have helped for sure. The article "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" gives a great explanation. Even better than Bob gave me (sorry Bob ;))! Check it out here!