This is fairly straight forward. Sign up for the Office 365 account for developers using this link. You can sign up for a 30 days free Office 365 account with the developer license.

Once you get the Office 365 environment, you can start developing apps for SharePoint online. There 3 types of SharePoint apps (this MSDN article describes it better) to be developed, this categorization is done using the hosting model of the application.

In your office 365 setup go to SharePoint and create a SiteCollection with the Developer Site template. Make sure to that the template is Developer Site otherwise there’s a high chance that you’ll get an error while debugging the apps which says  “Error occurred in deployment step ‘Install app for SharePoint’: Sideloading of apps is not enabled on this site”

Now you’re done, you can develop the apps 🙂