I bought the core clone wars set a couple months ago, but haven't been able to work on due to me heading off to university. When I get back home for winter break, I really want to start painting the set and put it together since I'll have such a huge amount of time on my hands. Along with that, I want to start playing it, so any general pointers on both of these sub topics for a new comer?

I don't play the CIS myself but I can give you a few pointers for each army

Clones

Clones like to be at range 1 of each other so that they can share green tokens between the squads,

don't waste an aim rerolling only 1 die if there is another clone unit within range 1 that could use it on their shot to reroll 2 dice.

Clones sharing standby's is very powerful (some say too much, this may get changed in the future)

Don't charge Obi-Wan in straight away unless you want to chare the entire army, he has some good command cards to give out tokens to his troopers around him.

CIS

B1's need a heavy weapon in the squad to be efficient

B1's also want to be within range 1 of the other squads around them but only of 2 squads, so that they can Coordinate an order down the chain.

1 or 2 HQ uplinks can go a long way (put them on B1's with the HH-12 for max efficiency)

Grievous wants to charge at enemies that are all with range 1 of each other (go via cover, he has scale), his 1 Pip command card is very good at hitting a lot of squads at once.

If you have any of the expansions let us know which ones and we can give you hints on how to use them.