First thing I did was max health in the guild, as I believe you should do that in any guild, and is important in magic where backfires can kill you. Then with the xp left I advanced a few levels of magic. I then did one or two quests that still give xp, on a totally unrelated note, all new players should goto the post office and check their mail or whatever :-) With this xp I advanced more levels of magic, and also advance ma.it.sc. I did this because I didn't want to spend half my life wandering around the library finding spells. Its a lot simpler to learn off a scroll, then rescribe it and keep them in packets in your backpack for when you die. Plus you can start earning money by scribing scrolls for people.
I then learnt some spells, either from the newbie tome in the gym or off scrolls that someone scribed. You should learn Jogloran's Portal of Cheaper Travel (portal), Malich's Penetrating Occular Lance (lance), Sorklin's Field of Protection (sorks) and Master Woddeley's Luminescent Companion (woodlys). This gives you light, an offensive and defensive spell and a way of travelling, all a new wizard needs!! Then if you can still learn more spells, just pick a few out to tm with, its best if you pick spells that don't need components like Scolorid's Scintillating Scribbling or Independent Recurring Vocaliser. Now here is where I disagree with a lot of wizards, there are spells in the newbie tome for blorping rocks with locations that you can portal to. Now its true that it will tm, but I personally think its not worth the stuffing around and that its a lot simpler to get another wizard to blorpe jewellery for you with some of the common locations you need such as the guild, Drum, OC. Also make sure you go see the Lecturer in Recent Runes to see what he can teach you. Then you start using magic!!! Unlike other guilds you don't have to kill for xp as a young wizard, as magic tms like mad and you get good amounts of xp for doing it. You have two options, you can goto the gym and just cast things for a while. If you do that, then get a group going with the other people in the room so you can share your tms. Also don't cast the same thing in a row, cast lance at the demon in there, then portal the chest, then sork the demon, then cast woodlys and shoo the light, and then make the chest talk. Doing something like that will ensure you get a good range of tms and some nice xp. The other way is to go out and about, always making sure you have sorks cast, lance any rats and cockroaches you see, always have woodlys cast, always portal if you can. You can also cast the misc spells, for instance walk down Short st and make all the lamps talk :-) Either way, the secret to advancing as a newbie is to use it, use it, use it!!! A lot of web pages tell you to advance fighting so you can get xp, but that's stupid! If you want to kill with melee skills then be a warrior!! While your hopelessly trying to hit something with a weapon then your not using magic, and the simple fact is, you are going to suck big time at melee combat till you spend a shit load of xp on it, but you can get good at killing things with magic a hell of a lot quicker. One thing you need to remember is that the consider command is useless for wizards as you will always have low hit points, therefore what I recommend is that you kill stuff you know wont follow and turn your wimpy up to about 90, then just wimpy and shield.
The recent changes to the skill system means that the 13 all rearrange you have when you start, isn't actually bad for a wizard. But eventually you will want to tweak it for your playing style. I would recommend getting at least 15 int but no more than about 18. Get enough str so that your not burdened (around 14 is nice) and therefore wasting dex, then split the rest up between wis, con and dex.
Ok, your tming away and have a bit of xp to spend, what next? Now is the time to start setting goals, what spells do you want to get good at. Although using guild xp gives you good xp as a newbie, you can't rely on it to get you far and you really need to kill if you want decent xp. It's always a good idea though to make sure they can't kill you first, that's why you should work on Endorphin's Floating Friend (eff) and Transcendent Pneumatic Alleviator (tpa). With eff, you can start floating light wooden shields, but they are useless in combat, and floating doesn't tm that well, plus you will find that floating is the easy bit, it doing anything is the problem. Therefore what I did was floated a small metal shield, then just advanced ma.sp.de till it started blocking. Also you will find that eff is actually your most important shield not tpa. That doesn't mean that tpa isn't important though :-) What I suggest you do its get a small leather shield from the leatherwork place in the Plaza of Broken Moons and some ash and cast tpa and see if it works. If it doesn't then spellcheck it fully and advance whatever is the worse and try again, keep doing this till it starts to work regularly and starts tming nicely. One mistake I made was not using Chrenedict's Calcareous Covering (troll skin) as soon as my tpa was working ok. Troll skin is expensive, but its a hell of a lot cheaper than buying new lives!! When you have troll skin don't fight anything that uses blunt or unarmed and your basically invincible :-) The troll skin gives you time to recast eff/tpa or run away, and will defiantly save your life over and over again!! Then you need an offensive spell. The next one up is Memories of a Vicious Chicken but its not really that good, and I mainly used it for finishing someone off. A new spell that is very useful for newbies is Narquians Mist of Doom (MOD). It is a nice easy to use offensive spell that does decent damage, the only draw back being that it uses your own hp to kill with. But if you have a decent amount of them and a bottle of tea or some oak wands to heal with then use it, just don't let your hit points get so low that a backfire will kill you. After that you want to aim for Kamikaze Oryctolagus Flammula (fire bunnies) and Pragi's Fiery Gaze (pragi) or one of its clones. Advance these like above with tpa where you try it then advance whatever your worse at. These spells will do damage when they backfire, but at low levels you fortunately wont do enough to kill yourself. You will almost certainly have to advance ma.sp.sp to get these spells, also the more guild points you have the better, but ma.po does tm very well, so as long as you have enough gp to do what you want without much waiting I would just leave it to tm. You should also be using a bronze helm by now to boost your Int. Remember that wearing one too long will kill you so make an alias like, wear bronze helm, cast tpa, remove bronze helm. Also have a wear/remove alias for combat so you cast a few pragis or bunnies while its working then just rewear it when it wears off
By now you should be close to guild level 40 and can join an order. I am not going to go into the pros and cons of which order to join as that's dealt with in detail in other pages. What I will say is that its important you join one as soon as you can, that way you can advance the skills you want to work on over level 50. After saying that, its very important though that you choose the right order as your stuck with it. You need to decide what spells or area of magic you want to concentrate on then join the one with the most primaries for what you want.
And that is basically what I did. If you want to learn a new spell then just remember it and cast it, if it doesn't work then spellcheck fully and advance what your worse at. I know the other pages are full of facts and figures, but magic is very random, and even if you fail you can tm. Also there are often safe ways to test something, for instance Al'Hrahaz's Scintillating Blorpler can do some serious damage if you fail, so practice on a copper or brass ring, as if they blow up they do very little damage. When you start fighting seriously you need to remember that consider is useless and therefore its best to turn your wimpy up and fight things that don't follow until you can work out what you can and can't kill. Also be very careful where you use pragi, as you don't want to pragi a feefs heavy in AM or a cat in KLK. Also remember that queueing more than two casts of fire bunnies at a time on something is a very bad idea, as you will probably fail the merge and have it backfire on you. Always have your shields up, and make sure you have a good supply of offensive spell components. Finally, make good use of your talker, the wizards guild is easy to advance in, but very hard to get the hang of.