How to select all columns except one in pandas?

When the columns are not a MultiIndex, df.columns is just an array of column names so you can do:

df.loc[:, df.columns != 'b']

          a         c         d
0  0.561196  0.013768  0.772827
1  0.882641  0.615396  0.075381
2  0.368824  0.651378  0.397203
3  0.788730  0.568099  0.869127

Don't use ix. It's deprecated. The most readable and idiomatic way of doing this is df.drop():

>>> df.drop('b', axis=1)
          a         c         d
0  0.418762  0.869203  0.972314
1  0.991058  0.594784  0.534366
2  0.407472  0.396664  0.894202
3  0.726168  0.324932  0.906575

Note that by default, .drop() does not operate inplace; despite the ominous name, df is unharmed by this process. If you want to permanently remove b from df, do df.drop('b', inplace=True).

df.drop() also accepts a list of labels, e.g. df.drop(['a', 'b'], axis=1) will drop column a and b.

df[df.columns.difference(['b'])]

Out: 
          a         c         d
0  0.427809  0.459807  0.333869
1  0.678031  0.668346  0.645951
2  0.996573  0.673730  0.314911
3  0.786942  0.719665  0.330833

You can use df.columns.isin()

df.loc[:, ~df.columns.isin(['b'])]

When you want to drop multiple columns, as simple as:

df.loc[:, ~df.columns.isin(['col1', 'col2'])]