It depends on how you define beginner. If you're careful, and follow the installation guide on the wiki, you should be fine. Often people recommend installing distros in virtual machines to get a feel for the process. However, if it's an older laptop as you said and not your primary machine, then you can always just go for it and if something goes wrong, you can format the drive and start again.

By the way, setting up wireless in the install process usually only consists of running wifi-menu, and a WM is as simple as `pacman -S i3` (or which ever wm you want) and launching it from the DM or .xinitrc. ;)

Another advantage of starting from a bare install like arch, or a trimmed down version of another distro, is that you get a feel for how the system is held together (what software is installed, how the disks are partitioned, etc.). Sometimes comes in handy if you need to debug something!