Hope you're crazy to buy Ripple due to it's market cap and the growth (Price). I would suggest you to split your investments and buy some altcoins with Ripple. You cannot depend on Ripple alone for profit/growth. Try Cardano and Stellar as well which is less than $1 and they are top performers. Split like Ripple 50%, Cardano 25% and Stellar 25%.

You have to if you want to get your dollars back some day.

Coinbase is a very good platform but the fees are way tooooo high. GDAX and coinbase belongs to the same company. GDAX charges very very little fees compared to coinbase. It takes several days to get your coin from coinbase.

Some other way is to buy pandacoin (PND) by paypal, exchange it on yobit.net to ETH or BTC, or LTC, etc. then exchange your coins on yout favorite exchange platforms.

1. PND takes around 24 hours.
2. you have to do some research on the exchange platform: coins? fees? exchange pairs?
3. you can exchange your PND on yobit, but which coins to exchange, ETH or BTH or LTC or something else? you'd better choose a most likely going up coin. You do not want to buy some coin and the price down, down and down. Even though you only need the coin as an exchanger.

Be careful and careful and careful to invest with your own mondy.

Bitcoin is not a good coin as an exchanger. The fees for bitcoin are very high and the price goes up and down and up and down.

https://yobit.net/en/freecoins/

As a newbie, you might try to register at yobit.net. You can get some free coins as a starter. You can get around $10 coins per day. You can get wallet address for your coins until you make your final decisions about which coins are your favorite ones.

Again, do some research before you dive in.