Besides playing around with Excel, any recommendations?

I am interested in the VBA portion of it, maybe not so much on the typical excel crunch.

VBA is kind of a dying language -- MS Office is the only thing really keeping it alive. I don't know how committed Microsoft is to keeping VBA going. If you are only interested in the programming language and not the stuff that the spreadsheet can do, it might be better to learn a stand alone programming language that looks more viable going forward.

That said, if you want to learn VBA, I see several general things to learn and resources to learn from:

1) Like any programming language, there's a generic "learning to program" step that is mostly about learning how to break a task down into steps and understanding the programming structures that are common to most programming languages -- inputs, outputs, variables, arrays, math operations, text operations, loop structures, decision structures, error trapping and debugging, etc.
2) You need to learn the statements and their syntax that are specific to the language you want to learn. I frequently refer to a reference like this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/off...uage-reference
3) Because VBA is so tightly knit with Office applications, one usually needs to learn Excel's (and other applications as needed) object model for interacting with Excel. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/off...l/object-model Of course, if you are not worried about the spreadsheet and may never interact with Excel from VBA, then maybe this isn't very important.
4) From VBA, normally one does most of their input/output from/to the spreadsheet, which means interacting with the spreadsheet's range object https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/off....range(object) Assuming you will use the spreadsheet for input and output, there is probably some value in starting small and learn how to read and write data from and to spreadsheet cells.
5) From there work on more and more complex procedures.
6) Half of programming is debugging, so you will want to quickly become familiar with VBA's build in debugging tools: http://www.cpearson.com/excel/DebuggingVBA.aspx

It's a lot to learn, but start small and work your way larger. It can sometimes be helpful to use the macro recorder to get a sense of the syntax needed for accessing a specific object, property, or method.