Resources:

• Joel Spolsky's What Every Programmer Needs to Know About Unicode
• Eric Fischer's History of ASCII and other character codes
• Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World's Writing Systems
• AMK's Python Unicode HOWTO
• Marc-André Lemburg's Writing Unicode-Aware Applications in Python
• Ka-Ping Yee's list of rewriting proxies, or mediators.
• John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
• James D. McCawley, The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters
• CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary
• The Unicode consortium's Unihan.txt
• The Letter Database