I highly recommend the Earthsea book by Ursula Le Guin (I actually recommend all of her books) and the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Frtiz Lieber. Especially if you are looking for something that is a quick read and not a 20 book, 50 billion page series.
Also the Drizzt novels by R. A. Salvatore, while not the same level of quality, are fun.
Also, from an enterprise point-of-view, .Net has the same advantages as Java (stability, runs everywhere, backed by a large corp) but is fundamental better designed and doesn't come with the potential legal baggage of being owned by Oracle.
I would argue that .Net is one of the best techs that Microsoft is producing at the moment. I've used it on and off for a number of years and haven't done any development targeting Windows in a decade. It's all be running on Linux servers. The dotNet works great there.
And, 100% agree with using Rider. My hierarchy of .Net IDEs is Rider->Notepad++->Visual Studio Code->manually adjusting the memory on my computer using magnets->Full Visual Studio (whatever they are calling it these days).
American? It's clearly a Liberian flag https://www.flagdetective.com/liberia-flag.htm