It's not rocket surgery, have the confidence to buy what you want for your first wheel build.
I could teach a chimpanzee to do the laceing part. The whole key to good wheelbuilding is in the tensioning and trueing. You can practice laceing with a used wheel. Tensioning and trueing - not so much. Assuming the rim has a little set in it (most old wheels) it will never come out right. I think that anybody who has average or better mechanical ability can produce a perfectly good wheel build on their first attempt using new decent quality components.