An N-bead chain (9 less than or equal to N less than or equal to 50) in solvent subjected to steady shear flow with shear rate ii is treated by molecular dynamics simulation in order to analyze in a systematic way the deformation and the alignment of polymers in such a nonequilibrium stationary state. The reduced shear rate beta = gamma tau(N), where tau(N) is the chain longest relaxation time, is the key quantity used to connect real experiments and simulations. Our results for good solvent conditions suggest that chains of various lengths do obey anisotropic scaling laws; beta-dependent Flory exponents for each principal axis of the gyration tenser are extracted from the global dimensions of the deformed chains and from their internal spatial correlations. The good agreement between the molecular dynamics data with results of experiments on dilute solutions of polymers subject to Couette flow supports the proposed scaling picture.