As long as the neck is straight and the frets are level, the most important thing you can do is to have a good setup. Your local shop can probably do that for you. I can take a $100 guitar and make it play just like a $1500 guitar, you need a good setup for ease of playing and learning without having the strings way too high. They can set your compensation/intonation, sadle radius to match the fingerboard, string/nut depth and string height. Nothing worse than trying to learn on a badly setup guitar.
John and the crew