newbie question - sorting results?

[Trever Furnish <trever@monster.com>]

I'm definitely mired in newbie status - can someone offer advice for the
following question?

Can one specify a sort order when performing a query, such that the results are
returned pre-sorted by the database, not by the client?  Something similar to an
SQL select statement ending in "ORDER BY column"?

It would make my head hurt so much less than trying to get a working
multidimensional array sort function in php (and hey, if you have one of those,
send that too! :-) )...

Thanks for any help.

Sincerely,
Trever Furnish, trever@monster.com
Monster.com Operations