Comment by thornjm

There is an excellent pre-packaged VM with levels of challenges that take you through the basics of exploitation to quite advanced levels called "Modern Binary Exploitation" [0]. I would highly recommend it.

You can also do the challenges using IDA/Ghidra instead of looking at the source for a proper challenge and I recommend doing this initially for each challenge.

[0] https://github.com/RPISEC/MBE