This is an area that's always been fascinating to me, but that I've never dived into. I'm not overly interested in this particular program, just exploits in general and perhaps examples of how and why they work. Anyone have any resources that they've found useful?

There's a ton of info out there in various websites and blogs. I like the RPISEC Modern Binary Exploitation class as a great introduction. The lectures and materials (and a VM!) are on github: https://github.com/RPISEC/MBE