Getting the auto increment value of the row inserted ??

Hi I am using PHP4 and mySQL. I have a table in mySQL with an auto increment column as the primary key. When I do an insert from the PHP page, I need to return the inserted record's primary key. Currently after inserting the record I am immediatly doing a "select max(pk) from tablename" to fetch the value. Is there any better solution for this. Many thanks -Mujahid