I haven’t played either Fallout 1 or 2 so any advice would be appreciated.

Just play them in the correct order: Fallout1 -- first, Fallout2 -- second. For the proper impression.

And use of the fan-made patches is mandatory since official distributions of these games still are too bugged.
FixIt in the "purist" or "fixes only" mode is good and sufficient for Fallout1 if you are a newbie.
Killap's Unnoficial patch is good for Fallout2.

But use unofficial patches only for the first walk-through. Do not try put in all the extra and "restored" content available right a way.
After beating games in this setup you'll understand yourself if you want to make a second run with Restoration mods.

Since you have to install the unofficial patches for classic Fallouts anyway that is not a problem. They revert censored content to the original form as well.

"Newer" stuff like perk pics too? Good if it's true.

What perks and what "newer" stuff exactly? In times when I was involved in the development of the named patches, censored pictures existed in the european disk releases only. GOG's electronic distribution is based on the late Interplay's electronic distribution. Which is effectively censored european release with components of the early fan-made patches 'accidentally' pre-installed by one of the Interplay's employees. That mean no children in Fallout1 and all drug-related perks and traits are censored. Is that what you mean?

Yeah. Children were ofcourse censored out of euro versions for ages, whitewashed pics is a later "addition".

Oh... This hypocrisy. Never actually saw it in the old Fallouts. May be because I own 'Classic' distributions on GOG which are no longer on sales. Need to check the newer distributions to make sure then.

Thanks. Where do I go to get the unofficial patches?

Here's the link to the unofficial patch and Restoration Project which adds locations removed from the game during development: http://killap.net/fallout2/web/Downloads.html. Just be sure to install the patch first and then the Restoration Project.

what about the fallout fixt mod from no mutants allowed?

Get it from the NMA, obviously.
https://nma-fallout.com/resources/fallout-fixt-small-fixes-mostly.7

Follow Schwertz's advice.
Also:
- Read the manual before playing, it will save you a lot of frustration
- There are 10 save slots. Use them all. Save in slot 1, then slot 2, then [...] slot 10, then slot 1 again. There's a crapload of bugs and of ways that you (or the RNG) can screw things up
- Be aware that if your character build is bad you might end up having to restart the game after 2-3 hours of play. Don't be shy of doing that or you might end up wasting more hours before having to restart the game anyway
- The water emergency in FO1 is real. If you waste too much time your Vault is doomed. So don't waste too much time on side quests, you will have plenty of time after saving your people.
- If you start the Blades quest in the Boneyard in FO1 make sure you don't leave the city or a bug might kill a character making it impossible to finish it diplomatically
- Don't dig up Richard Wright's grave in FO2 while investigating his death or the Wrights will try to kill you and make the quest unfinishable

And that's it I think. Once you get past the bugs and general clunkiness you'll get to enjoy two amazing RPGs with great writing (especially 2) and a lot of choices and possible approaches.

FO1:

Glow. Keep multiple saves. Pre-quest.
You can get radiation poisoning so bad you can't heal it in time.

FO1:

- Each time you talk with potential enemies of the Vault decreases a counter for Vault discovery by the said enemies by one day. So limit those interactions to the necessary minimum. (It's a spoiler of course but you can not get this knowledge neither in-game nor from manual nor even from the most of the fan-made resources. Found this fact when decompiled scripts myself.)
- Arranging water delivery with caravans postpones Vault demise from the thirst but discovery counter is decreased for the fair amount too.