Addressing output pins

I am an admitted newbie, I have experience with the basic stamp but am getting my feet wet with the Arduino.

I remember asking on some forum before but can't remember where and I searched and didn't find an answer...

The basic stamp has a way of addressing pins as words and bytes (i.e. INS, a 16 bit word, references all pins, INL is the low byte, INH is the high byte, INA is the low nibble, etc). This comes in handy when controlling multiple outputs by copying a word, byte, or nibble to the appropriate memory location. Is there a quick and dirty way of doing this on the Arduino? The Aduino seems great for controlling individual discrete outputs and reading individual discrete inputs but sometimes you want to do things in parallel.

Thanks!

Soon as I posted this I found the original thread...
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1226940231/0#0
Thanks to those who replied, it was a while ago, yes, I forgot already.

So, my new question to validate this post... How do you use port manipulation with the new Mega?

The mega should operate the same as the standard, using PORTx and DDRx, only x goes up higher (to L, I think, but check the datasheet) compared to D on the standard arduino mega8 family.

-j