Getting Details From A Row That Satisfies A Group Criteria In A Different Field

I know only enough SQL to be dangerous, but I'm stumped by this general task.

I need to know the method for selecting info from several fields of the records that satisfy a group function criteria on one of the fields. Example: Table contains Employees, products, amounts. If I group on Employee, and product, I can find the total amount of each product's sales for that employee.

create view prod_sales_by_emplyoee
select
employee
product
SUM(amount) as empl_prod_total
from sales
group by employee, product

But if I want to know which product made each employee the most money, I don't know how to do that, because the MAX function works on each field individually, not by row. From the above view, (or a table created from it) I want to know how to identify, for each employee, the product they made the most money selling, and what proportion of their total sales that product accounted for. Then, I'd like to use those results to eliminate the top tier, and find their second place product, etc.

I can do this in Access by sorting the table produced from the above view by empl_prod_total in decending order, joining that to a view that groups by employee only and provides a total, then using a grouped query on the joined data, I can use the "FIRST" function to find the values in each field of the record with the highest sales for that employee. However SQL doesn't have the FIRST function in its aggregate functions.

I suspect there's a standard way SQL does this, but it wasn't in my class. HELP!