This is worth it just for the link to radare: http://www.radare.org/y/?p=features

I don't actually program a whole lot and when I do it's usually part of a reversing effort on something obsolete or buggy or that I can't figure out how it works (not warez stuff, though). Assembler is enormous fun to dig around in if you have time on your hands and enjoy puzzle-solving. Another good free tool if you're into this sort of thing is Ollydbg. : http://www.ollydbg.de/