I did a small presentation on the subject of internationalization (zipped powerpoint). Definitions, Unicode, the ISO-8859 alphabet soup, the Windows encodings and more are touched upon. The presentation itself is light on details, but the comments tell you more. I plan on doing a second part in the future. Stay tuned.
After I did the presentation, a collegue pointed me to a recent java.net weblog entry: changes in the Unicode support in J2SE 1.5. Worth a read, whether you're a Java programmer or not.