My 40 minute driving commute was really getting on my nerves. I then discovered books on tape on my smartphone and now it's pretty tolerable. Having a transit commute would be better though because I could read books on programming topics. There are no books on tape where the subject matter is programming that I'm aware of. It's pretty obvious it wouldn't work very well anyway. Maybe "Coders at Work" or "Mythical Man Month" would work well on tape though, since they're written in a narrative style without a lot of diagrams or code.
What about technical podcasts? If you're into Java, I'd recomment the Javaposse. I am sure there is a podcast for your line of work/passion. For a non specialized IT-Podcast I like to listen to Buzz out loud. They produce about 30 minutes every workday.
Finding enough information-dense podcasts can be difficult, and programming books on tape may not exist at all, but my occasional long commutes got much more bearable after discovering that an iPhone can read technical books out loud with text-to-speech. Turn on VoiceOver in iBooks to do it. Many O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers books do rely on narrative, and you can always tackle the remaining code listings later.
