Been building PC for most of my life, actually now realize that i have never bought or owned a prebuilt PC :). I agree with the general statement here, it's never been both easier and economical to build a PC. The only blemish theses days are GPU prices which are still wonky and never really recovered from the mining craze + pandemic shortage.

I really like https://www.youtube.com/@PCBuilderChannel for the pragmatic and clear explanations. It's a very good place to start and he has videos on all the important subject.

But while i have your attention :

Step 1 : Decide your budget

It's easy to go overboard or to try to skim on important things. You probably want to reflect on your use cases and decide what is important for you. If gaming is the main focus, then most of your budget sink should be for the GPU. Find the best GPU you can afford, and then design/build the rest of the system as to not bottleneck your GPU.

Step 2 : Select your Platform

Probably the hardest when i come to part selection for someone new. Platform generally refers to the combination of motherboard + cpu + ram. Things are bit complicate to navigate here because they all need to be compatible, and the fan boy-ism is at its peak here.

Good news though, there is virtually no bad choices here, the CPU/motherboard/ram prices have come down and it's never been better to be buying.

On the CPU side you have first AMD vs Intel, then which generation (zen 3 vs zen 4 or 12th vs 13th gen intel), then you which performance tier (3 vs 5 vs 7).

On the motherboard side, you can group motherboard per "chipset" usually the tradeoff between price and peripheral support (things like usb4/thundebolt,pci5 vs pci4 etc...)

Step 3 : Select your form factor.

For someone new, i would recommend to get as big a case than you can fit in your environment. A big case maximizes component compatibility and really really make the building process easier. I would straight avoid ITX and focus on mid-towers or compact cases.

Step 4 : Post your proto build on a reputable forum, read the comment, ignore the crazies and iterate.

Finally, you want to keep things are simple as possible. PC building is a hobby and a rabbit hole in self. A lot of the example, advice online come from very passionate people who are okay sinking tons of hours in the process. So general recommendations :

-- For a first build, i would avoid anything to do with water cooling, cpu overclocking and low timing ram kits. Nothing wrong with any of it per say, but those tend to be the area of most problem and debugging a non functional build really really sucks.

-- Stick with reputable brands name when doing part selection. The Asus taxes is real, corsair PSU are over-priced and fractal cases can be boring. But in return you get (most of the time, all brands are capable or producing turds) some piece of mind and somewhat better return/support.

-- PC parts in general have a pretty aggressive diminishing return on the price/performance curve. Don't spend too much on any single component before making sure you actually need/want the extra oompphh

-- Electronics and PC parts in particular are depreciating assets. If you are patient, you can really really save a good buck on your build.