Shell Programming and Scripting

I am relatively new to *nix and have set up a small home network with a red hat server, what i would like to do is write a small script to check to see if a computer is connected by using the ip address of the computer. can get the ping to return but cant get the echo line working. the output i would like to see is:

$ ./ipchk xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is available
yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy is unavailable
zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz is available
$

any help would be greatly appreciated
thank you

oh.. i know i need to use the exit code from the ping command but how do i get that value returned and assigned to a variable, the other thing is i dont want all the ping information onscreen when i run the script, running ping in the background using the ampersand doesnt seem to accomplish this

[code]

ping hostname > /dev/null 2>&1
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
echo hostname alive
else
echo hostname dead.
fi

works like a charm