Working with emoji or special characters eventually turns up notation like U+1F600 โ here's what that means.
What a code point is
Unicode assigns a unique number to nearly every character in existence โ Korean, Chinese characters, emoji, symbols โ and that number is called a code point. It's conventionally written as U+ followed by hex โ the letter "A" is U+0041, and the grinning face emoji is U+1F600.
Code point vs. actual storage (encoding)
A code point is just a character's "unique number" โ how many bytes a computer actually uses to store that number, and in what form, is decided separately by an encoding like UTF-8 or UTF-16. The same code point can end up as different bytes depending on the encoding.
Common use cases
This is useful for identifying exactly which character an emoji or special symbol that's rendering broken actually is, for specifying a particular Unicode range in a regex (Korean syllables: U+AC00โU+D7A3), or for checking whether a font supports a given code point.