Unicode is a 16-bit encoding scheme for written characters, intended to cover all the major alphabetic and ideographic writing systems of the world. The encoding has been developed by the Unicode Consortium, whose members include most of the largest hardware and software companies. The intent of Unicode, of course, is to overthrow the hegemony of ASCII, which is inadequate even for American English. With the corporate support of the consortium and the technical impetus gained from its support by the Java programming language, Unicode is now ready to do just that.

The Unicode 1.0 standard was published in 1991, and version 1.1 in 1993. The present volume presents the revisions to level 2.0. A volume that is primarily hundreds of pages of tables of characters is not exactly bedtime reading. Nonetheless, the ancillary information, and indeed the tables themselves, offer some glimpses of the fascinating complexities of the writing systems of the world. While there are many other books available on that topic, this is one that any computer professional can read on the job with a clear conscience.