Original author here.
Starting with bitcoin is probably the easiest, but on first contact with any cryptocurrency you should be prepared to lose it all. I'm on day 2 of my journey now on which I made first contact with exchanges. Now I found out that BTC, LTC and ETH are probably the best to start with, since they are the "base" currency to buy most of the other currencies. I hope to blog about that tomorrow or the day after.
