Have a look
here. The guy has about 200 videos covering Visual Basic from the basics (installing) all the way to GUI creation.
If you want dead tree stuff, I would not recommend the SAMS "teach yourself" books. They aren't too good imho. Try books from O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley or Microsoft Press. They have, on average, much better authors than the low-level publishers (SAMS, Wiley etc.).
If you know German I had some nice experiences with
this.
If you find this useful, I would take Magicka off your hands ;-). But no pressure since this is fairly abstract advice after all :D.