VS2013 Community (which is just a bit more recent) is extremely useful if you want to target Windows as a hobbyist.
It feels like they've included a bit more of the Windows platform SDK and a few of the auxiliary SDKs you'd normally find on the full Visual Studio, but were strangely absent from Express.
I actually use VS2013 Community at work to build simple reporting tools, but also at home now to build a fairly complex plugin I maintain for X-Plane.
As convenient as VS2013 is as a total package, their C/C++ compiler is somewhat rubbish in terms of standards compliance (it's missing a lot of newer language features). The VS2015 beta apparently fixes a lot of that, so I'm looking forward to the final release.