The Fount of All Knowledge about CVS is the Cedarqvist book.
You should be able to find a copy of it online doing a basic web search for (CVS Cedarqvist). I have a "dead tree" copy myself, I believe it was printed by Coriolis Press. Cedarqvist covers setting up and maintaining CVS repositories, checking stuff in and out, and most importantly for you, what branches and tags are and how to use them.
There should be help attached to the Eclipse Help menu that will assist in connect Eclipse to one or more CVS repositories (I had about 4 of them at one time). Once you have the repositories defined, the Team menu will provide you with all the functions you need except for checking out entire projects. You check out a CVS project using the New/Project menu.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.