http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

This article is awesome!  True to the author's claim, dealing with Unicode is not hard once you understand it.  I've been one of those developers that did kind of hope that everything would return to normal where a character is alway 8bits.  I've been putting off understanding string encoding issues because it seemed to be a complicated issue for a problem I rarely have.  It really isn't.  Give Joel's article a read.