[Rails] ROR Recipes Beta: Why use taggings instead of tags_contacts? NoMethodError tag_with?

[softwareengineer 99]

I have gotten acts_as_taggable to work for a test application as documented on taggable.rubyforge.org
  
  I am following Chad's excellent examples in ROR Recipes Beta book.
  
  I have a few questions and hope that Chad or some other expert can help clarify them.
  
  1. Why is the book suggesting to use taggings table instead of tags_contacts, as mentioned on taggable.rubyforge.org?
  2. How can I use this taggings table instead of my tags_contacts? 
  3. How can I store additional fields such as member_id in the tags_contacts table or taggings table?
  4. When I follow Chad's example on my Favorite class, (with  tags_favorites and taggings table created) I keep getting the  NoMethodError for "tag_with"? At first I thought this may be because I  am using taggings table but then when I created tags_favorites table  the error persisted.
  5. I finally used the tag method as described on rubyforge.org and it  works. So my question is, is tag_with a typo in the book or am I  missing something?
  6. Why does the following output say @new_record=false even when the  record was created? Is it to prevent further entry of the same record?
  
  Loading development environment.
  ./script/../config/../config/../lib/localization.rb:5: warning: already initialized constant LOCALIZED_STRINGS
  >> f=Favorite.create(:url=>'http://home.com', :title=>'Home  Pages title', :desc=>'My note about this favorite',  :created_at=>Time.now)
  => #<Favorite:0xb6f5d594 @new_record=false,  @errors=#<ActiveRecord::Errors:0xb6f54bb0  @base=#<Favorite:0xb6f5d594 ...>, @errors={}>,  @new_record_before_save=false, @attributes={"updated_at"=>Sun Feb 12  15:30:38 CST 2006, "title"=>"Home Pages title", "portal_id"=>0,  "member_id"=>0, "id"=>12, "url"=>"http://home.com",  "desc"=>"My note about this favorite", "created_at"=>Sun Feb 12  15:30:38 CST 2006}>
  >> f.tag_with("home tag1 tag2")
  NoMethodError: undefined method `tag_with' for #<Favorite:0xb6f5d594>
          from  /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/base.rb:1501:in  `method_missing'
          from (irb):2
  >> f.tag("home tag1 tag2")
  => ["home", "tag1", "tag2"]
  
  
  Thank you very much for your assistance.
  
  Frank
  
  
		
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