If you’ve ever taken a literature course at school, then you’ll likely have been struck by how much in-depth application of thought goes into the simple act of reading. In the early days, reading in class was just about getting used to the words and enjoying the story. We might have gone into some depth when it comes to structure or storytelling, but the main exercise was to enjoy the writing. Moving on to academic literature was like opening a door we didn’t even know was there until someone pointed it out. There is a universe of depth beneath the best stories and if we know how to open the door to it, it gladly lets us walk around.  
 
Of course, the main element of why we read stories is for the enjoyment of it. If we didn’t take pleasure in the art of writing, then we’d not bother to read it beyond the necessary. Many people prefer the pages of a book to the flickering screen or the scratchy radio. Most of us are content with a variety of the three. Why bother to go any further than this? Why do people apply theory and rationale to stories that go way beyond the contents of the page?  
 
Reading stories that are true to life in certain aspects can help us to understand these truths in a way that transcends the usual observer. Being involved with the story puts us in the shoes of the culture and its behaviours giving us a true awareness of the experience we wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. We can get to grips with social situations that might be alien to us and we can learn what it’s like to be one of the group before we’ve even met them.  
 
The complex and inventive storytelling architecture can become influential across genres and scopes. A style, a method, and a progression can all be translated into other scenarios with completely new backgrounds. Often, it’s the appreciation of clever ideas that provide us the motivation to have our own or to mirror what we like into our own working projects. It’s not just our projects that benefit; a good story can become a real-life motivator for home and work. By learning about people and their virtues, we can be truly influenced by someone completely fictional. 
 
Have you ever felt for the people in the story? Empathy is something we all have to practice. Our imaginations can only perceive the emotion in someone else if we can appreciate where it comes from, the thinking that accompany it, and the kind of mental picture it creates. If we’ve not been in a person’s shoes before then we are severely limited in how to appreciate someone’s humanity. Everything becomes dry and intellectualised which, in the real world, often results in lost rapport. When we learn from literature, the facts might be made up but the people in the story are represented in a true-to-life way. That’s why we enjoy the stories and it’s why we want to find out what happens next. We relate to the people that we feel the most affiliation to. This is why the best stories have vivid and colourful characters who artfully represent the reality of our lives.  
 
 The way we learn language as children is by listening and repeating. We build the pictures in the mind as we learn how phrases are used. The words themselves come later, with expressions of sound being our first attempt. Babble is a baby's first attempt at replicating human speech. By the time we’ve learned to read, we know a lot of words and their phrases. But we don’t stop there. The process continues. Reading gives us instant access to ways of speaking that we might not be exposed to in our local environment. The writing from around the world and from across the centuries can enrich our vocabulary beyond what any illiterate life could provide. The more we can say, the more we can achieve.  
 
Perhaps the most valuable part of studying literature at an academic level is the ability to think critically. When we critically assess a story, we don’t just judge the people are villains and heroes, we look at them as human beings or complete creatures with rich and valid emotional lives. The systems the story purveys and the relationships between characters invite us to think about the validity of what’s going on the reasons why things are this way, and what, if anything could be done to affect the world. A make-believe scenario gives us a playground to be politicians and lawyers, historians and warriors, so we can learn about how to apply genuine power in the genuine world.  
 
Dive into academic literature for free with these YouTube playlists. 
 
Various Sources – English literature over 200 videos 
 
Paul H. Fry – Introduction to the Theory of Literature 
 
Amy Hungerford – The Amercian Novel Since 1945 
 
Various Sources – English Literature lectures 50 Videos 
 
Langdon Hammer – Modern Poetry 
 
Bob Ahlersmeyer – British Literature 
 
Dale B. Martin – New Testament Literature 
 
John Rogers – Milton 
 
Harvard – Shakespeare After All 
 
Refaat Alareer – English Poetry 
 
Merin Simi Raj – History Of English Language and Literature 
 
Klasify Academy – Literature in English 
 
This covers a lot from a wide variety of people and backgrounds. Naturally, the content on YouTube is changing all the time and more great literature courses might appear or become findable on search over time. Once you’ve sifted these, do keep your eyes open for anything else the algorithm suggests. Comment with your discoveries. 

If you're one of those people who like to keep professional courses forever and go the extra mile with your learning, you can find affordable and professionally tutored literature courses here.​
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It seems that everyone is talking about how Generative AI is putting jobs at risk. The ability of computers has always changed work and skill requirements, and yet there is always someone operating them. There is always someone designing new ones and maintaining them. This time, with Gen AI, the human hand is being replaced at another level. Is it like the printing press, where one person’s words were enough for everyone? This reduced the need for scribes yet created need for printing operators, paper makers, and ink producers.  
 
People are frightened, things are being done for us on levels we are not used to. Generative AI can create art, it can write scripts, stories, and make films. It can even write website code. I’ve tried it, it works. So why bother learning how to code anymore if the computer can do it for us? It’s not quite as simple as that. It helps if we think of Generative AI like a Star Trek replicator. The engineer might need a replacement gasket and so asks the computer to create one. The engineer has to first know what to look for, what to ask for, and how to implement the fix. Your website is much like a starship, only it shuffles users through information rather than outer space. If you asked the replicator to make an entire starship, you’d be totally useless as an engineer.  
 
When you build a website, you’ll likely know that it has an engineering element and a creative element. In order to create the whole product, you need an holistic understanding of the language the internet reads so you can produce the webspace necessary for all the required functions. This is a work of art much like building a house or a car from scratch. The sheer pleasure of creation from nothing is something people are not going to give up easily. You might ask the Gen AI to come up with a piece of fixing or a certain switch mechanism, to fulfil a purpose. How do you know what to ask for and how would you insert the generated code into your project? Do you know what you’re doing or not? 
 
Give a novice painter a series of paints, brushes, paper, and instructions, but no practice, will you get a valuable painting? Probably not. Ask the Generative AI to produce the website, according to all specifications, will it work properly? How will you know? And what if someone asks you to update it or change one of its processes? Where will you start? You’ll need to know exactly what you’re doing. 
 
What kind of coding courses are people interested in, bearing in mind they know all about Chat GPT and Microsoft Copilot? These are all highly lucrative skill sets that prove you to be a cut above the rest in the age of laziness and AI. When it’s easier to fake it, and blag basic knowledge, those of us who go the extra mile will go the extra mile indefinitely. Let’s have a look. Please note that Alternative Fruit gets funding for every signup. These are permanent course, so when you do sign up, you get full access forever. 
 
The Web Developer Bootcamp 2025 
 
What you'll learn 
The ins and outs of HTML5, CSS3, and Modern JavaScript 
Make REAL web applications using cutting-edge technologies 
Create responsive, accessible, and beautiful layouts 
Recognize and prevent common security exploits like SQL-Injection & XSS 
Continue to learn and grow as a developer, long after the course ends 
Create a blog application from scratch using Node, Express, and MongoDB. 
Create a complicated yelp-like application from scratch 
Deploy your applications and work with cloud databases 
Create static HTML and CSS portfolio sites and landing pages 
Think like a developer. Become an expert at Googling code questions! 
Create complex HTML forms with validations 
Implement full authentication from scratch! 
Use CSS Frameworks including Bootstrap 5, Semantic UI, and Bulma 
Implement responsive navbars on websites 
Use JavaScript variables, conditionals, loops, functions, arrays, and objects 
Write Javascript functions, and understand scope and higher order functions 
Master the "weird" parts of JavaScript 
Create full-stack web applications from scratch 
Manipulate the DOM with vanilla JS 
Write JavaScript based browser games 
Use Postman to monitor and test APIs 
Use NodeJS to write server-side JavaScript 
Write complex web apps with multiple models and data associations 
Write a REAL application using everything in the course 
Use Express and MongoDB to create full-stack JS applications 
Use common JS data structures like Arrays and Objects 
Master the command line interface 
Use NPM to install all sorts of useful packages 
Understand the ins and outs of HTTP requests 
Create your own Node modules 
Make a beautiful, responsive photographer's portfolio page 
Create a beautiful, responsive landing page for a startup 
Implement user authentication 
Create a beautiful animated todo list application 
Create single page applications with AJAX 
 
100 Days Of Code: The complete Python Bootcamp 
What you'll learn 
You will master the Python programming language by building 100 unique projects over 100 days. 
You will learn automation, game, app and web development, data science and machine learning all using Python. 
You will be able to program in Python professionally 
You will learn Selenium, Beautiful Soup, Request, Flask, Pandas, NumPy, Scikit Learn, Plotly, and Matplotlib. 
Create a portfolio of 100 Python projects to apply for developer jobs 
Be able to build fully fledged websites and web apps with Python 
Be able to use Python for data science and machine learning 
Build games like Blackjack, Pong and Snake using Python 
Build GUIs and Desktop applications with Python 
 
Java Script - The Complete Full-Stack Web Development Bootcamp 
What you'll learn 
Build 16 web development projects for your portfolio, ready to apply for junior developer jobs. 
Learn the latest technologies, including Javascript, React, Node and even Web3 development. 
After the course you will be able to build ANY website you want. 
Build fully-fledged websites and web apps for your startup or business. 
Work as a freelance web developer. 
Master frontend development with React 
Master backend development with Node 
Learn professional developer best practices. 
 
Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 2025 
FULLY UPDATED FOR CLF-C02: Pass the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification 
Full Practice Exam with Explanations included! 
Learn the AWS Fundamentals (EC2, ELB, ASG, RDS, ElastiCache, S3) 
All 300+ slides available as downloadable PDF 
 
LLM Engineering: Master AI, Large Language Models & Agents 
 
What you'll learn 
Project 1: Make AI-powered brochure generator that scrapes and navigates company websites intelligently. 
Project 2: Build Multi-modal customer support agent for an airline with UI and function-calling. 
Project 3: Develop Tool that creates meeting minutes and action items from audio using both open- and closed-source models. 
Project 4: Make AI that converts Python code to optimized C++, boosting performance by 60,000x! 
Project 5: Build AI knowledge-worker using RAG to become an expert on all company-related matters. 
Project 6: Capstone Part A – Predict product prices from short descriptions using Frontier models. 
Project 7: Capstone Part B – Execute Fine-tuned open-source model to compete with Frontier in price prediction. 
Project 8: Capstone Part C – Build Autonomous multi agent system collaborating with models to spot deals and notify you of special bargains. 
Compare and contrast the latest techniques for improving the performance of your LLM solution, such as RAG, fine-tuning and agentic workflows 
Weigh up the leading 10 frontier and 10 open-source LLMs, and be able to select the best choice for a given task. 
 
Summary - Having AI on hand to help with your coding is a good thing, using it to build your entire site is not so good. A professional is always able to show their working, improvise, and implement novel and ad-hoc techniques according to specific circumstances. Your AI script will look a lot like the other person's version and if you ask for the change, it'll do it the same way each time. Don't give away your power and your pleasure, add value to your own.
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