I recently discovered that i could use <%= SkinPath %> within my .ascx skin file to basically create relative links

(this seems like functionality thats extemely important to know yet i found out on these forums by accident rather than in the help skinning documentation or skinning tutorial websites, or even the skinning section of a big thick dotnetnuke 4.0 book)

But at any rate, my question is 1) where can i find a list of all the variables like this that i have access to? and 2) is are there parsing limitations being put on the skin templates or can one simple throw in some if/for loop statements to get some tricky stuff done without making modules?

Yes, anything you can do in server-side code can be put it in your skin.

Here are some examples:

http://blogs.snapsis.com/PermaLink,guid,1e160dd9-6120-48eb-9e6d-e53af1762b9f.aspx

http://blogs.snapsis.com/PermaLink,guid,105f8d79-ffbc-4859-836c-b747364fa59c.aspx

http://blogs.snapsis.com/PermaLink,guid,eef98c82-f54d-480b-8e36-309ca6e406d8.aspx

http://blogs.snapsis.com/PermaLink,guid,46c9ab35-9bb7-4ff9-a8e9-63ff3497c7f0.aspx