Hey gang,
I'm kind of interested in learning some hacking/virus basics. I wanted to try out some scripts but I'm kind da nervous. Can I run simple viruses on a VM without worrying about my laptop getting infected too? I would think so, but I wanna be sure.

Also, if you have any resources you can point me to, that would be great. Thanks!

You are safe, just open the prey in vm rather than the host

Cybrary is a goodish free resource.
There's also a great book on reverse engineering by Bruce Dang (but it requires you to be familiar with x86 assembly and Windows internals)
Also, see if you can find EC-Council study material, especially for their penetration testing certifications (CEH and all).
And finally, Black Hat Python is a really interesting book on how to use Python for...nefarious purposes.

And yes, VMs are totally safe as long as there's no link to the host. You can simulate a whole network of devices, complete with a firewall and everything, and simulate various scenarios. If you have enough RAM. Very cool stuff.