Popular Posts – excluding a particular category

Hi – I have a popular posts SQL type script running that works well, but I was wondering – can I exclude posts from a particular category?

Here is an excerpt of the current code – I’m a total nooobie at this…

function wp_popular_posts() {

		global $wpdb;

		$result = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5");

		foreach ($result as $post) {

			setup_postdata($post);

			$postid = $post->ID;

			$title = $post->post_title;

			$commentcount = $post->comment_count;

			if ($commentcount != 0) {

Thanks