Introduction and Overview

This chapter introduces the fundamental concept of scaling laws and their critical role in understanding the value and performance of networked systems. It provides a unified perspective bridging traditional communication networks and modern deep learning models, both of which exhibit nonlinear growth in capability with scale. We outline the theoretical foundations of scaling laws, survey their manifestations across communication and learning domains, and present the organization of the book. This overview sets the stage for deeper technical explorations in subsequent chapters on throughput, transport complexity, expressive power, and information dynamics in scalable systems.