New to Weight Lifting! Advice!

As most have said, a strength training program (you can use an actual program or devise your own, which is what I do) will be ideal while eating at a deficit. As far as reps and sets, anywhere from 4-6 reps are recommended for strength training - anything more and you are entering into hypertrophy or endurance. You can do however many sets you like to I guess, although of course you will need to take time into consideration. I do about 4 sets myself, which I preface with some warm up sets at 65/75/85/95% my working set weight (still working on how many reps work best for me for warming up).

I used to do full body 3x a week but for me it ended up not giving me enough rest. I now work out 4x a week, but on an upper/lower body day split so I am getting 48 hours of rest despite working out back to back. I do squats, lunges, deadlifts, and jakc-knife situps as my lower body training. For upper body, i do shoulder presses, bench presses, bent-over rows or lat pulldowns (alternate between them), and I'm still deciding on my lateral deltoid exercise; either dumbbell raises, upright rows, or lateral raises. Likely will be the first or last, upright rows are more likely to bother my elbows. I started out with the basic 5 - deads, squat, rows, BP and SP - and added in these others based on my own needs. I increase the weight when I can, but being in a deficit... it's not a frequent raise. So since you're also at a deficit, don't expect to be making huge gains in strength the entire time. Initially sure, you'll get newbie gains, but after that it's going to be slower. Just listen to your body, take a week off every few months, etc.

Oh, and protein is super important. 0.8-1.5g per total lbs is a good range to play with. I do about 0.9-0.95 per lb for myself, which I've found just works best for me.