A search-engine friendly URL question

[dawnrae]

Hello all,

Here's something that really confuses me and I hope perhaps someone here can explain it to me.
Is a URL like this:

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?p=page-name

search engine friendly?
I've read that when a search engine hits the "?" in a URL, that some, if not all of them, will stop searching.
My site is set up very basic in it's URL structure, just as shown above. It is not pulling information from a database or anything complex. I would just like to know how, using PHP, mod_rewrite or whatever to remove the "?" from those URLs and show them like so, or something similar:

http://www.mysite.com/pages/page-name

I've read tutorial after tutorial and all are showing much more complex original URLs and I am not very experienced with programming of this nature.
Anyone willing to lend a hand here to a total PHP greenhorn?

Dawn