SQL: How to order rows within GROUP BY

Let's consider the following posts table

 title  | author |    published_at
--------+--------+---------------------
 Post 2 | Zaiste | 2015-03-02 00:00:00
 Post 1 | Zaiste | 2015-02-01 00:00:00
 Post 4 | Mary   | 2015-03-04 00:00:00
 Post 3 | John   | 2015-03-02 00:00:00

Our question is: What's the latest publication date of each author?; to answer it we will use max aggregation function.

SELECT author, max(published_at)
FROM posts
GROUP BY author;

 author |         max
--------+---------------------
 Mary   | 2015-03-04 00:00:00
 Zaiste | 2015-03-02 00:00:00
 John   | 2015-03-02 00:00:00

Similary to get the oldest publication date of each author we will use min function.

SELECT author, min(published_at)
FROM posts
GROUP BY author;

 author |         min
--------+---------------------
 Mary   | 2015-03-04 00:00:00
 Zaiste | 2015-02-01 00:00:00
 John   | 2015-03-02 00:00:00

To order those results we use plain ORDER BY clause with min function as its parameter.

SELECT author, min(published_at)
FROM posts
GROUP BY author
ORDER BY min(published_at) ASC;

 author |         min
--------+---------------------
 Zaiste | 2015-02-01 00:00:00
 John   | 2015-03-02 00:00:00
 Mary   | 2015-03-04 00:00:00