Thanks for the answer. I wish you had stopped at "Yes It's that simple".

So for quick and dirty every day use it sounds like I can just say something like:
$exit_status = $?/255;

I've never understood what bitwise AND (the '&' operator) does. Plus I've never encountered the ">>" operator before (I looked it up it is called a shift operator but the explanation of what it does was way beyond me). From your answer I get the impression I'd need to go back to college and take some pretty advance math or maybe computer science classes to understand them.