WordPress 2.0: Limiting The Number of Posts on the Home Page?

Hello, I am new here. I am AppleG5, and I am new to WordPress.

I am in the process of placing all of my old articles from my portal system to WordPress. For some reason, WordPress is showing ALL of the articles on the home page from both of my categories. (The reason why I only have 2 categories is so that I don’t get mixed up; that and I haven’t moved all of the articles.)

Anyways, what I was asking for is how to edit WordPress 2.0 to show only a specific amount of posts on the main page, as well as showing the posts from a specific category.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance. ??