Unicode, in friendly terms: ASCII, UTF-8, code points, character encodings, and more

Ever been bit by a Unicode bug? Maybe you weren't treating UTF-8 encoded data correctly, or tried to read it as ASCII? Maybe you mixed up UTF-8 vs UTF-16? Unicode and character encoding might seem like a tricky topic, but let's break them down and learn about them piece by piece, from ASCII to code points to graphemes to combining character modifiers and more.