news site, recent entries retrieval

Hi, I am writing a back end to be used by general news and journal sites and i am running into some problems. I already did all the background work, created the tables, programmed a php news manager to add, edit, remove entries/comments, etc. The problem is displaying all the info on the site. Whats the mysql command to display only "n" entries? I mean, assume i want to display only the 10 most recent entries on the main page, how do i do that? :-P One of the fields in my tables is "type" (values 0, 1, 2 etc), which divides the news into categories, how can i display like the 10 most recent entries of type = 2, for example? I am lost, could really use some help. Thanks! Pag