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Add text more inclusive for Bioconductor #11

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Add text more inclusive for Bioconductor #11

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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion 03-packages.Rmd
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Expand Up @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ The vast array of add-on packages that extend the functionality of the R languag

The CRAN website currently contains more than 12,000 packages for R. These packages are submitted by the user community and then extensively checked for common problems before being published to the website. R itself contains a tool to download any packages that a user might require and install them ready for use. Such packages may extend R in a variety of ways: from adding new data processing algorithms to providing access to public datasets, or from providing R users a way to build their own web APIs to providing simple functions to interact with existing public APIs. The options are huge.

And it doesn't stop there. If you work in genomics there is an alternative to CRAN, called [Bioconductor](https://www.bioconductor.org/) that works in the same way, but has almost 1500 packages specific to that field. On top of that, it’s also possible to install packages directly from [GitHub](https://github.com), where much of the open-source development of R packages takes place. From GitHub it’s possible to install development versions of packages that have a stable version on CRAN as well as packages where the author has not submitted to CRAN.
And it doesn't stop there. If you work in genomics there is an alternative to CRAN, called [Bioconductor](https://www.bioconductor.org/) that works in the same way, but has almost 1500 packages specific to that field. Some Bioconductor packages are also useful in other fields, like the [hdf5](https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/rhdf5.html) package to work with HDF5 files in R. On top of that, it’s also possible to install packages directly from [GitHub](https://github.com), where much of the open-source development of R packages takes place. From GitHub it’s possible to install development versions of packages that have a stable version on CRAN as well as packages where the author has not submitted to CRAN.

The main CRAN site has an extensive selection of mirror sites around the world so it’s usually possible to use one that is located close to your physical location in order to spread the load across the system. The most commonly used of these mirrors is '[cloud.r-project.org](https://cloud.r-project.org)', which uses a globally distributed CDN to ensure high performance and resilience. Further to that, Microsoft run a site called MRAN (the “M” stands for “Microsoft”) which is a daily snapshot of the official CRAN site. This means you can use MRAN to install packages as they would have been this time yesterday, last month, or last year. This can be a useful tool to aid reproducibility.

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