Hello!

My advice - trust no one, read everyone. Slowly you might start discarding certain sources of information based on your research.

Remember, digital currencies are worth nothing! Their only long term value lies in their use-cases. Take steem for example, we are using it right now.

As for exchanges, you want to look at bittrex and poloniex. I have started hearing that people are not trusting poloniex as much, but we should be keeping any big amount in a private wallet anyway.