>>QUOTING
Most of my bugs involved getting the polarity wrong on the btfsc and btfss.  Whats methods do you Gurus use to help getting
these right the FIRST time.

>>ME
Experience, I guess, and care.  Personally I wish that Microchip had defined the opcodes as "execute if set"/"execute if clear" rather than "skip if clear"/"skip if set".  If they changed it now, though (documentation change only) they'd just really confuse everyone.

For the common case where the instruction to be skipped is a jump, I think of a "btfss" as "execute the stuff, FOLLOWING THE JUMP, if the bit is set", and vice versa for "btfsc".  Still make mistakes occasionally, but not too often.

Another thing which I do, which I've seen some others here do as well though Microchip hasn't officially sanctioned it, is to indent by one extra space the instruction following a conditional skip.  For example:

        ; Routine to convert a number 0-15 in W into an ASCII character '0'-'F'
[untested]
        addlw   h'F6'   ; 0-9 A-F -> F6-FF 00-05
        btfsc   C
         addlw  7       ; 0-9 A-F -> F6-FF 07-0C
        addlw   h'3A'   ; 0-9 A-F -> 30-39 41-46

>>QUOTING

Also I see instructions in example code that are not in my databook..  Like skpnz.  They seem to assemble under MPASM fine.
Are these built in assembler macros?

>>ME

The Microchip assembler provides macros for "skpc", etc. which simply expand to "btfss C", etc.  Generally, these macros simply expand to the one obviously-suitable instruction though in the Parallax assembler some people use there are a number of multi-instruction macros as well.