How to remove specific categories from posts?

Question

I need to select all posts from database without fetching some categories.
For example I fetch posts with this code:

$featuredPosts = new WP_Query();
$featuredPosts->query('showposts=40');

So, now, how can i remove categories with id of: 22, 23 and 24?

Answer 1

Make query like this:

$query = new WP_Query( array( 'posts_per_page' => -1, 'category__not_in' => array( 2, 6 ) ) );

2, 6 being the category ID you want to exclude.