On whether truing stands are necessary:

I built my first two wheels last year because I had a 1983 Paramount that the original owner had rebuilt with crappy blade spokes that kept breaking. I wanted to keep the nice Campy hubs and Mavic rims, but the local bike shops did not want to deal with rebuilding two forty year old wheels.

The rebuild was theoretically easy because I had the spoke length and lacing pattern already established. I did the front wheel first. I built it at home without even spinning it in the fork, and it came out straight and round on the first try.

I figured, wow, this is easy. Then I did the back wheel. As I tried to get it dished properly it was looking more and more like a 7th grade science experiment with a gyroscope that is slowing down. I took it into the co-op and got it straightened out pretty quickly with a tension gauge and a truing stand that had calipers. I probably could have got it straightened out by spinning it on the bike and plucking the spokes, but it might have taken a very long while.

I'm very happy with the wheels, and I never miss chance to say "yeah, I rebuilt those wheels myself."

The moral of the story is to go to your local co-op. Buying tools you might only use once is sort of fun, and I do it fairly often, but it is not necessarily good advice or economically rational (unless maybe you are living out in the sticks and you are the local equivalent of the co-op).