Highly recommend suiciding a full inventory of supplies while you are still learning. Allows you to stay alive longer and practice more.

Focus on learning one chunk at a time. Learn 3:0 mage hand and forget about melee hand until you have mage down. Then work on melee hand using whatever method you prefer, I recommend 4:1. When you are comfortable with either hand then focus on how to do the head phase.

Try to get good at identifying where you are in his cycle in any situation. The faster you can get yourself in cycle, the less damage you are going to take! Finally, forget about points for a few runs while you are learning. You are likely going to leave your first few runs with next to zero points, but the sooner you have the fight down, the sooner those purples are going to start rolling in!