A good starting point for all newbies is Kaggle. It is a platform for budding and experienced data scientists where you can start learning data science from scratch if you are a newbie (there are Kaggle tutorials for this purpose) or you can take part in Kaggle competitions where you can gauge where you stand against other people.
Another great option is Youtube tutorials. There are literally hundreds of tutorials on virtually every topic you could imagine in data science/data analysis. Also they will provide you with proper guidelines and best practices to follow in data science.
There is plenty of material on the internet for data science be it articles, videos or competitions. Just select one or two platform and start without wasting too much time on gathering the materials or choosing which platform to start!
Cheers!