In addition to a number of still useful tools, MINIX also comes with several tools that were created to ease configuration and development on MINIX without being part of any standard and are therefore unlikely to be known to people familiar with other POSIX systems. Such tools are now obsolete, but you may encounter them, perhaps when browsing history. This page describes these tools. For more in-depth information consult their man pages.
In the remote times, MINIX's processes needed to know the stack allocation beforehand. This was done using the chmem(1) utility. Sometimes one wanted to increase several utilities for a small period of time. binsizes did that, with some templates (normal, big, xxl) found in the /etc directory. bigmake is a wrapper around make using the big template.
unstack was a debugging tool which converts a stack trace with addresses, such as the one printed to the console when a segmentation fault occurs, into a one with names. It obtains symbols from the symbol table of the binary from which the stack trace originated.
It has been superseded by addr2line, now that all binaries are in ELF format and we rely (for now) on binutils for linking and such anyway.
packman used to be the MINIX package manager. It allows one to install binary and source packages. It has been phased out starting from MINIX 3.1.8.
binpackage and binpackages automated the building process of packages; packit was used at installation time. There was also a guide to making packman packages.
MINIX spawns a long timeframe; and while the C language is a firmly-established standard, not such are the assembly language syntaxes. So there is a long history of difficulties because of the various syntaxes which has been used with MINIX. Fortunately most of this material is now obsolete, and the move is almost completed toward the ATT syntax used with the GNU assembler.
No, not as such (but see below). Minix assembly languages (yes, in plural form), and Unix systems' assemblers in general, use syntaxes that are tailored to serve as compiler back ends, and as such look strange at first to those who are used to Microsoft MASM and similar assemblers. There are several documents about Minix assembly languages which may be helpful here:
Randall Hyde's The Art of Assembly Language Programming website site offers downloads of versions of his assembly programming text in three flavors: for 16-bit DOS, for 32-bit Windows, and for 32-bit Linux. There's a lot of other interesting stuff on this site.